Somnolence
by on rooftops
Summary: She thought he must have been lonesome, there inside his head. — Teddy/Lily - for Connie
1. Prologue

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Harry Potter_.  
**A/N:** Connie (Bubbles of Colours) asked me to write a retelling of a fairy-tale, with Lily and Teddy as the main characters. It was meant to be a one-shot in _it was not in our cards to be forgettable_, but it turned into something much more unwieldy. I'm sure that this is not at all what she was hoping for, but I'm afraid this is what happened. At the moment I think it will probably be seven or eight chapters (I _know_!). I hope you enjoy, despite the strangeness!

This is the story of a sleeping Teddy.

Prologue

Teddy Lupin had had a nice childhood. He knew it was nice—his gran and his godfather were brilliant, they _were_—but sometimes he found himself thinking about his parents. He knew that his life, the one he loved, resulted from their deaths, and that thought made him wonder whether he could be considered cursed.

Not that there was anything particularly bad about Teddy's life. It was easy, if a little odd. There was the whole metamorphmagus thing, of course, but he loved his colour-changing hair and malleable skin. He had gotten it from his mother, his gran said, and so he had to love it, because he couldn't love _her_. And his father's life had been cursed, no denying that, but Teddy had inherited his father's smile and bravery and none of his wolfishness.

So he wasn't certain what to make of these thoughts, the ones about curses, the ones that formed a shaky foundation for layers of happy memories. Victoire asked him once, in her second year, his third, why his eyes got dark when he looked at the memorial on the edge of the Hogwarts grounds.

He stared at her. "The war, you know?" He gestured toward the pile of broken stones, held together by a combination of gravity and magic.

Victoire reached out and gripped his wrist. "I know. It was a tragedy. It makes me sad too. But you always look like...I don't know. Like all that sadness is coming from inside of you, rather than from the past. From that." She gestured toward the broken pieces of former castle.

"Well, it's our memories that make it sad," he pointed out.

"Yeah." Victoire dropped it.

Four years later he stepped onto the Hogwarts Express for the last time, and Victoire held his hand tightly. Their mate Graham followed them into an empty compartment and the three of them sat in silence as the train pulled out of Hogsmeade and began its long journey south. _Last time_, Teddy kept thinking, _last, last, last._

There was not such a big space between the past and the present, he thought, running an absentminded pattern over the back of Victoire's hand. She sighed and pressed her head against his shoulder.

Four more heartbeats, and then she said, "Couldn't you both have failed Transfiguration or Potions or something?"

Graham snorted. "I think it was technically impossible for Ted to fail anything."

"Not true," Teddy protested, although it may have been. "But Vic, don't worry. You'll be fine. You have friends in your year."

"Yeah," Vic sighed. "But none of them are like you." She pressed her temple against Teddy's shoulder so hard he worried she was going to get a bruise there. "Either of you," she added after a moment.

Graham ran his hand through his hair. "I'm not shagging you, so I don't expect the same treatment as Lupin. It's rather obvious he's your favourite."

"Piss off," Teddy muttered, as Vic raised a bitten fingernail to flick off their friend.

"See? Clear favouritism going on here." Graham stretched out on his seat and continued, "But seriously Victoire, you'll be fine. Just another year and you'll be free like me and Ted."

"Yeah, speaking of, have you two made any plans yet?"

"London, baby." Graham stretched his arms over his head and rapped a rhythm against the window behind his back.

"Have you gotten jobs?" Vic asked, pulling away from Teddy's shoulder so she could raise her blonde eyebrows at him.

He reached out and twisted his fingers in a few strands of golden hair. "Nope. We'll find something, though. Our plan is to visit every wizarding pub in the city. If none of them want us, then we'll try the Ministry."

"How will you afford a flat?" Vic asked, reaching up and wrapping her fingers around Teddy's wrist. She pulled his hand free of her hair and returned it to his lap.

"Harry's given Teddy his godfather's old place. Didn't he tell you?"

Victoire shook her head and kept her eyes on Teddy; his cheeks flushed and his hair tinged a pale rose colour. "I was embarrassed. You're always saying how Harry's too nice to me."

"Because he _is_, but that's still big news." Victoire rolled her lower lip between her teeth. "So it's just going to be the two of you there, then?"

"Dependent on both of us getting jobs. Harry says he'll take it back if we're not 'gainfully employed' by September," Teddy explained.

Vic laughed. "So it's an incentive. I take back what I said about Uncle Harry being a pushover."

"Yes, well, don't concern yourself, Victoire, we'll be making money by September." Graham kicked his foot against her jean-covered knee, and she stuck her tongue out at him.

"And then," Teddy drew her head back towards his shoulder, "when you leave Hogwarts next year, you can move in with us, yeah?"

She pressed her hand against his t-shirt, a five-fingered promise. "Yeah, all right." She spoke into his neck.

"Ugh, you're disgusting," Graham groaned. "I'll be kicking both of you out if you don't calm your hormones by then."

Victoire smirked. "It'll be us against you and you'll end up homeless and alone."

"We'll see about that." Graham sounded grumpy, and Victoire tapped a toe against his outstretched foot. He grinned at her. "No, seriously. It'll be great, Vic," he promised. "You, me, and the bear here."

Teddy rolled his eyes, but repeated, "It'll be great."

And it was. That summer Victoire visited and Teddy and Graham spent their time working behind a bar or drinking in front of one and everything was going perfectly. Teddy had a picture of his parents on the mantle in one of the spacious drawing rooms of 12 Grimmauld Place. They were laughing in the photograph, and Teddy began thinking that all of his concern over curses was rather childish.

And then he and Graham began experimenting with potions. It started as a simple thing, after a night out in a club where vials of violet and blue liquid got passed around so frequently that neither boy could resist a taste. And then the world spun around, righted itself, hardened, took on a hazy glow, and burst into a fierce-edged universe of fascinating colours and movements and people. Graham and Teddy woke up on their sofa the next morning, looked at each other, said, "Wicked," and lugged their cauldrons out of storage.

It happened in early December. Teddy and Graham were both in the kitchen, stirring their hallucinatory potions, and Teddy dropped a vial on the stone floor. He knelt to pick up the pieces, throwing in a few "Fuck"s for good measure, and one shard sliced his index finger as he dropped it in the bin. A line of red bloomed against his fingertip, blood running through the grooves of his skin and he muttered, "Fuck," again.

"You all right?" Graham glanced up from his cauldron, which was full of an orange liquid he claimed would allow the user to have some control over his hallucinations.

"Yeah, fine." Teddy wiped his hand on his jeans, staining a streak across the cloth.

Graham shrugged and turned back to his potion, and Teddy stirred his—a bright purple concoction he hoped would make its drinker see in a kaleidoscope of colours—and a few drops of blood fell into the cauldron, hissing as they hit the surface. "Shit." Teddy reached for another vial to try and scoop out as much of the blood as he could before it contaminated the whole potion, and as he dipped the glass into the drink, his fingertip brushed the liquid.

He blinked a few times as the potion sizzled against the open cut, and then everything looked silver for an instant. He collapsed, his heart pumped purple blood, and the world turned black.

:::

When she was eight, Lily's father moved her into her god-brother's old room. The problem, Harry explained as he Levitated her wardrobe up the stairs, was that Teddy's room was in the attic, and Teddy couldn't get up there anymore.

He told her this in such a sad tone that she didn't point out that Teddy didn't look like he could get_ anywhere_anymore, so whether his room was on the ground floor or the top one didn't seem to matter for him. He would just lie there either way. She also didn't point out that putting an eight year-old in the very large, very draughty, many-windowed attic of an eighteenth-century house did not seem the best way to maintain the health of the still-well members of the family. Her silence on that front had nothing to do with her father's sadness, though. She had always loved Teddy's room, and while she was sad that he had somehow entered into what appeared to be an eternal sleep, she didn't particularly mind moving upstairs.

She especially didn't mind when people started visiting her comatose god-brother. They slept in the guest bedroom beside her old room—Teddy's new one—and whenever she ventured downstairs she found them in the kitchen, getting drinks from the fridge, or beside his bed, speaking in hushed voices like he'd wake if they spoke too loudly. Like they didn't want him to wake.

The worst were Victoire and Graham and Teddy's grandmother. Victoire and Graham came separately at first, and once Lily was grabbing a biscuit from the kitchen when Victoire was leaving and Graham was arriving, and they didn't even look at each other as they passed in the hallway. Lily could feel the iciness between them from where she was hovering in the doorway to the kitchen, and she waited there until Graham had disappeared in Teddy's room and Victoire had shut the front door behind her.

But eventually the silence between them stretched so far that it snapped, and they started visiting Teddy together. The voices that filled the first floor sounded almost like they used to when Graham and Victoire and Teddy all came for visits in the summer, except Teddy's deep laugh never joined in with the other two.

Teddy's grandmother had wanted him at her home, but Lily thought it must have been easier for her parents to look after him. Teddy's gran spent a lot of time sitting at his side, holding his nerveless hand. The first few months she only left when Victoire and Graham came to visit. Even Teddy's other friends, the ones who only stopped by for an hour or two, had to sit in there with Teddy and his grandmother.

Lily hated it all. She hated the healer from St. Mungo's who came by nightly to care for him, to check for changes—there were never any changes. She hated the grey shade of Teddy's grandmother's skin, and the way Victoire and Graham held hands when they entered the bedroom, like they needed strength to see their best friend. She hated the way her father wiped his eyes on his sleeve after visiting Teddy every evening, and the way her mum sat with him as she drank her morning coffee, and how her brothers sat in there doing reading in the afternoons. She had only gone into Teddy's room in the beginning, when her father made her, because most of all she hated the way he lay there, with his hands flat on the sheets, ready for somebody to take hold of them and make it look for a moment like he could feel. She hated the brown colour of his hair and the paleness of his skin and the way his lips were chapped and the way his nose never changed. Teddy was dull and empty, and Lily didn't recognize him.

She started using her bedroom window rather than the front door. She dropped down a floor to the balcony outside her father's office and then climbed down the weed-wound trellis to the soft soil of the overgrown garden. It was better than passing the groups of people in Teddy's room, than running into Victoire and Graham and their sadness. And later, as life started getting too busy or too much for everyone who was awake for it—even Teddy's grandmother—when Teddy's room remained empty for what seemed like days on end, sliding down the side of the house was better than the silence on the ground floor and the knowledge that despite the quiet her god-brother still breathed in her old room.

She got used to silence, as first James and then Albus left, and she locked the attic door against all the sorrow in the first two floors of her home. She read and drew and inked designs on her pale skin. She dreamt of escape, and when she finally turned eleven and fled to Hogwarts, she submerged herself in the noise so deeply that even hours spent in the library needed company. From the moment the Sorting Hat shouted, "Slytherin!" to the trip on the Hogwarts Express in June, Lily did not allow herself one moment of silence. Even her dreams were noisy.

But then she got home. She had asked her parents if she could spend summer holidays with Ris Parkinson or Bea Zabini, but they had said that they missed her too much to let her go away for the whole summer. "Maybe next year," her father had said, when she pointed out that Albus was spending the summer at Scorpius's, and that James practically lived with Rose.

Sometime during the second week of holidays, Lily passed by Teddy's room to find that the door had swung open. Someone had left the window unlatched, and a summer breeze ruffled the papers on the desk—her father's, he often did work in there. She hesitated in the doorway, and then stepped across the threshold for the first time in three years. She stopped beside the bed and looked down at the man beneath the sheets.

He was tiny. He had always been such a lively force in her life, such a beautiful, vibrant man. And now he looked skeletal. If she lifted the sheet and the shirt his healer had dressed him in the night before, Lily was certain she'd be able to count his ribs. She dropped her hand to his and felt paper.

"Merlin, you must be lonely," she said softly. And then she snorted. She used to pity the people who talked to Teddy, because he was so clearly gone. She had decided soon after he arrived in her house that if something like this ever happened to her, she'd want someone to kill her. She had even written Albus a note, which she'd hidden inside her copy of _The Tales of Beedle the Bard_, asking him to poison her if she ended up like their god-brother.

"If I were a Gryffindor," she told Teddy, "I'd have killed you already." She sighed and perched on the edge of the chair her mother used in the morning. "But I'm not, so you don't need to worry."

She looked around. Her father had painted the room a light blue colour when they had first moved Teddy, and the walls were covered in photographs of his parents and he and Graham and Victoire and a few of Lily's older cousins. Dominique was throwing water at a laughing Teddy in a silver frame on the bedside table. "It's nice in here, I guess," Lily said. "Could be worse, I mean."

"I don't know why I'm talking to you," she said after sitting in silence for a few moments. "It's just that there's no one around, you know?" She shook her head. "And talking to you is slightly less insane than talking to myself." _Just barely_, she thought.

Lily stopped avoiding Teddy's room, but that first summer she only visited him when her house was empty and Hugo wasn't answering her Floo calls. In subsequent summers she found her way down the stairs late at night when she couldn't sleep, and in the early afternoon when the sun made everything ache with beauty and Teddy was alone. She thought he must have been lonesome, there inside his head.

The summer after her sixth year she sat on the edge of the chair and stared at him. He looked like he always did—thin, pale, small. He could have been a cadaver but for the slow rise and fall of his chest. "Sometimes I think about death," she told him, "and how I used to wish it for you, because you look so sad. But lately I've been thinking," she took his hand, limp like always, "I think I could find you a cure."

Teddy hadn't reacted to anything in eight years, but Lily half-expected that pronouncement to bring disbelieving blue to his hair. It didn't. She continued anyway, "I know, it sounds crazy. Dad's had the most talented healers in the world working on you, and none of them have done a thing. But I'm going to try. Okay? I'll just try, and we'll see where that gets us."

She dropped his hand after a few more minutes, and just as she was about to leave the room she glanced over her shoulder and said, in a rush, "I've done some stupid shit, Teddy, but I think if I could help you none of that would really matter. It'd counterbalance, right? So that's my plan." And then she left, because her plan sounded horribly selfish sitting there unanswered and undisputed in the sleeping man's bedroom.


	2. Chapter One

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Harry Potter__._

Chapter One

Lily stuck her right hand in the pocket of her jeans and knocked with her left. She counted to seven before Graham opened the door. He stepped aside when he recognised her. "Hey, Lily. I wasn't expecting you. Is everything all right?"

"Yeah, fine." Lily followed him through the small entranceway to the kitchen. She leaned against the table and he stayed silent for a few seconds, his eyebrows raised, before turning to stir something on the stove.

"Vic's not around—she's out shopping or something with Molly—were you looking for her?"

"No," Lily rushed. "No, I wanted to see you." Graham faced her again. "I mean, either of you, but...yeah, you."

"Okay," he drew the word out and set the spoon on the counter by the stove. "So?"

"I want to talk to you about Teddy."

Graham's lips curved downward. Lily crossed her arms. "What about Teddy?" Graham asked.

"Nothing, like...just...I want to know what he was like and...I mean, what happened."

Graham flicked off the stove, shoved the pot off the burner, and poured himself a glass of water from the sink. He handed Lily a second glass and she held it with slippery fingers while he drained his. "Lily," he finally began. "Look. This isn't. I mean, Teddy—he's hard to talk about. We all loved him, we all lost him, and bringing him back up...it's not going to do any good."

Lily rolled the rim of the glass along her lower lip for a moment. "I'm not trying to start anything. It's just," she paused, wondering if she would sound selfish, and then decided it didn't particularly matter anymore, "it's just, Teddy's lived downstairs practically forever and I barely know anything about him."

Graham pinched the bridge of his nose. "I hate to be a dick, but _Teddy_ doesn't know anything about Teddy right now. And he probably won't ever again. I understand your curiosity, I do, but it's sort of disrespectful to come here wanting me to tell you stories about my best friend."

"I'm sorry." Lily kept her voice soft.

Graham blinked. "Never thought I'd hear _you _say _that_." He set his glass down on the counter and wiped his palms on his jeans. "It's been almost nine years and I still can't believe it. Imagine waking up some mornings from a dream where he's still—still him, and then you roll over and your nose is in his girlfriend's hair and you remember that _he _is gone and that _she _is actually your fiancée and your whole world takes a moment or two to readjust."

"And you mourn him all over again." Lily didn't need to fake the pity.

"And I mourn him all over again," Graham agreed. "So you wanting to hear about him, Lil, it's tough, okay? Talking about him with Vic or your parents, that's fine sometimes. But just telling you about him—that would hurt. Especially as it seems as if it's just curiosity. And I'm not saying you're coming from a bad place, but you're still asking about my best friend." Graham's voice turned hard for a moment, "And he happens to be lying brain dead on your bed."

"Not my bed," Lily pointed out before she could catch herself. Graham gave her a pained smile.

"Close enough."

"Okay." Lily held her hands up, the right one still gripping the glass of water. "I understand. It's just...I've been thinking a lot lately, about what happened and why it happened and why no one can heal him and it's all so bloody frustrating."

"You think we don't realise that? Fuck, Lily, it's the absolute worst."

"I know, I know, but what if there were some way to cure him?"

He dropped his head into his hands. "I kept hoping for...for a long time, I kept hoping. But your dad has had _everyone_ come see Teddy. Anyone who could possibly help. And they did nothing. There hasn't even been a change in his pulse-rate in nearly nine years." Graham inhaled, exhaled, held his breath. "I don't believe that we will ever get Teddy back."

There was a noise in the hall and both Graham and Lily glanced over to the doorway. Victoire stood there, a shopping bag in one hand, the other tangled in her short hair. She looked from Graham to Lily and back again, her eyebrows lost in her bangs. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing," Lily and Graham said together.

"I just had some questions," Lily explained. Graham sighed.

"Oh? About what?"

"Teddy," Graham answered, stepping across the kitchen to drop a kiss to her forehead.

"Oh?" Victoire dropped her bag to the floor and kicked it into the corner. She brushed her hand over Graham's arm as she approached the stove and wrinkled her nose at whatever was in the saucepan. "What about Teddy?"

"I've been thinking," Lily rushed, feeling Graham's gaze on her, "about how to heal him. And I know," raising her voice because both Graham and Victoire had started speaking, "that you both think it is impossible. That everyone thinks it's impossible. I do knowit's improbable. But what if there were even the slightest possibility that I could find a way to wake him up? Wouldn't you want me to try?"

Victoire pressed a fist against her lips, her blue eyes concerned. Graham moved to stand beside her. He looked livid, eyes burning. As if she'd betrayed his trust. "What makes you so special? Why the fuck do you think you can achieve something where everyone else has failed?"

Lily waited a few seconds. Graham didn't say anything else, but he was breathing heavily. Victoire's expression did not change at all. "I'm not _special_." Lily couldn't keep the derision out of her tone.

"You sure as hell seem as if you think you are."

Lily counted out the seconds again. "No, I just think that healers and potions masters don't have the right knowledge to help Teddy."

"I'm sorry, healers don't have the proper knowledge for _healing_?"

"Why do you think you do?" Victoire spoke softly, her fist still obscuring her lips.

"For healing _Teddy_, whose illness is not exactly usual. Or exactly an illness. And I don't think I do, on my own. I think that you guys do, and that the only thing I'm really bringing to this is a willingness to try."

"I'm not willing." Graham pushed away from the counter, started pacing. "You came in here just interested in _him_, and now you're trying to raise our hopes—I can't...I can't go through this again."

"Honestly, Lil. I don't think you know what you're doing," Victoire said. She reached out and brushed a few strands of red hair away from Lily's face. "You want to help, I can see that." She glanced at Graham. "She _does_," and then she turned back to Lily, "but I can't imagine this helping anything. It will just bring up old pain, you know?"

"It already has," Graham bit.

Lily held up her hands. "Okay, okay. I'm sorry." She glanced at Graham. "I really am sorry. I'll stop."

"All right." Victoire sighed. "So, would you like to stay for dinner?"

Lily looked at Graham, who was staring at the floor, his hands in his pockets. "No," she said. "No, thank you. I have to get home."

"At least come look at the new dress I bought!" Victoire reached for Lily's hand, pulling her around the table and snagging the shopping bag from the floor with her other hand. She led her cousin down the hall and into her and Graham's bedroom. It was a terribly transparent ploy to talk to Lily alone, but it was possible that Graham was annoyed enough to not see it.

"Lily." Victoire dropped the bag on the unmade bed and kicked her flats into a pile by the tiny window. "I know you don't give up easily, but I honestly think this is a bad idea. Please, let it go." She shut her eyes for a moment. "Let Teddy go."

"Like you have?" There was a photograph on the bedside table of Victoire and Teddy and Graham, from sometime during their early Hogwarts years. Victoire glanced at it.

"Remembering is not the same thing as holding on." Lily rolled her eyes. "It really isn't, Lily. And besides," Victoire hesitated, "besides, you never even really knew him. Not to be rude, but why do you care?"

Lily shrugged, reached for the bag on Victoire's bag and opened it. A silky grey dress fell onto the bed. "It's lovely," Lily told her.

"It is," Victoire agreed, picking up the dress and holding it to her shoulders. She turned and the skirt twirled out a little. "It's for this party I have on Friday, for work. An end of the summer job-well-done thing for all the staff photographers." She dropped the dress back to the bed and faced Lily again. "I really want to know, Lily. Why the sudden interest in healing Teddy?"

"It's just not fair that we all go on living, being horrible or happy or nice, whatever, and he just lies there. And he will still lie there, even after I've moved out, after my parents are retired, after you and Graham are married and after James comes back from India—Teddy will just be there." Victoire's face was trained into stillness. "And you have thought of all this, obviously. Much more frequently than I have, and of course it means so much more to you, but I just," Lily inhaled, kept going, "I just had this thought that maybe we could change it, change Teddy's future. Somehow. And after I had that thought, not trying seemed impossible."

Victoire leaned against the door to her wardrobe, falling back a little as it shut behind her. "It's a nice thought, Lily, but you realise that it is naive? You may think you have something that the healers don't, but I can't imagine that it would actually be enough to wake Teddy up." She bit her lip. "Can you let it go, please? For me, and for Graham, if for no one else?"

"It wouldn't change anything between the two of you, if he woke up." Lily knew that Graham and Victoire would never have gotten together if one of them had even a thought that they wouldn't have fallen in love had Teddy not entered a coma.

Victoire's eyes narrowed. "How selfish do you think we are? Even if it would change something between us, of course we'd rather Teddy was awake." Lily took a half-step back, rolled her lower-lip between her teeth. "That's not the issue. It's what I was saying earlier, Lily. It's just going to end with all of us hurting and Teddy still sleeping."

"But I—" she began. Victoire shook her head.

"Please, Lily. Just stop."

She nodded. "Okay."

"Okay okay? You'll leave Teddy be?"

"I promise." Lily kept her gaze steady on Victoire's and the older girl nodded.

"Thank you." Victoire stood, pulled Lily in for a quick hug, and then opened the door to her bedroom. "Are you sure you don't want to stay for dinner?"

"Positive. Mum and Dad will be worried about me." They probably would be, Lily knew, but she wasn't interested in going home quite yet. "Thank you, though."

"Of course."

Lily paused on her way through the kitchen. Graham sat at the table, the _Prophet _spread in front of him. He glanced up and nodded when Lily passed by, saying "Bye, Graham," as she shoved the front door open and made it into the hall.

She headed down the stairs, out onto the street, and down again, into the nearest Tube station. She took the underground straight to the admissions building for King's College, where she leaned against one of the walls by the entrance and tapped an unlit cigarette against her lips.

She hadn't been particularly surprised at Graham and Victoire's responses. After all, why would they have believed that she had a chance at helping Teddy? Lily readily admitted it was absurd, that she was messing in something very much larger than herself. But she wasn't about to let this go. If Victoire and Graham didn't want her to do it, then they didn't need to know. She had promised Teddy she'd wake him up, and she would.

A skinny man leaned against the wall next to her, tipping his head so his blond curls drifted near her hair in the cool summer breeze. "Any chance you'd let me bum that cig off of you?" he asked.

"Hey, Connor." Lily held it out. "I don't have a light, though."

"That's fine." He turned his body towards her and tugged a wand from the waistband of his jeans. He pressed it against the tip of the cigarette and inhaled where Lily's red lipstick had smudged around the end. Sliding his wand back beneath his t-shirt, he exhaled a breath of smoke before turning back to lean beside her. "So, why did you want me to meet you here?"

"I know that that whole visiting-student thing last semester was just a one-off," Lily began, "that our Muggle Studies classes only allowed us into Kings for one day. I was wondering if there was any way I could come back, though?"

"What do you mean?" Connor reached over and twisted his fingers in some red curls. "Are you quitting school to become an illegal student in a Muggle university? It's a good life, although I never expected to see the great Lily Potter fall prey to it. What _will_ your father say?"

"Piss off." Lily pulled away so her hair slid from his fingers. "I don't want to leave Hogwarts. If I could just come here for one class—I really want to learn about Muggle medicine."

"You mean all the classes in the Medical School and nearly all the ones in the sciences. And I'm not even a med student, Lil. Literature, remember?"

"I know that. You're the only person I know here, though. You have," she waved her fingers in the air, "connections, or whatever."

He cocked his head, looking at her, slowly exhaling clouds of smoke. "Let's say I'm able to get you into a biology or an anatomy course. What would be in it for me?"

"My undying affection?"

"Not exactly what I'm looking for."

"I'll owe you." Lily leaned her head against his shoulder. "Forever."

"Better," he said. "And also I expect to be able to get cigarettes from you whenever."

"Whenever," Lily promised.

"Okay. I'll try to find something. We may need to forge some paperwork for you, although if I can get you into a big enough lecture course, you can probably just come in without even needing to fill anything out."

"That would be ideal."

"Well, obviously. Being the undocumented student is always the perfect solution." He shook his head. "Do I even want to know why you're doing this?"

"I'm just interested," Lily told him. "In Muggle medicine, I mean."

"Sure you are, Potter. Don't bother lying to me. I don't care enough for there to be a purpose in it."

Lily smirked. "Have I told you lately that you're my favourite?"

"Not in the last few months. It'd probably happen more frequently if you needed favours more often."

Lily rolled her eyes, but didn't bother denying that their friendship was based rather heavily in the realm of convenience.

"How are you going to manage getting here a few times a week to take a class, though?"

Lily shrugged. "Let me know when the class is, and I'll work it out." She glanced at her watch. Nearly seven. "Do you have plans tonight?"

Connor shook his head. "None that can't be rescheduled."

"Want to get dinner with me?"

Connor dropped his cigarette and ground it against the pavement with his heel. He held out his hand to Lily and she took it. "That sounds like a brilliant plan."

Lily and Connor found themselves in a pub after dinner, Lily slipping Molly's old Muggle ID across the sticky surface of the bar. Lily felt a bit wobbly after two pints, and Connor gave in after three, and they walked hand-in-hand in the late summer streets, silent as tourists crowded loud, cameras capturing lit-up sights and drunken grins.

"Are you sure you have to go home tonight? You're welcome to stay in my flat." Lily smirked and Connor shook his head. "I've got a sofa you can kip on, stop looking like that."

She laughed. "Oh, Connor, I would love to stay with you, but my mum and dad are probably livid as it is. I wouldn't want to make Dad send his minions after me."

Connor rolled his eyes. "Only you could get away with calling Aurors 'minions.' I can't imagine how they would react to that."

"Probably just say, 'Lily Potter, it's past eleven o'clock, what are you doing out of bed?' and then Apparate me home."

"A bit like having defence-trained babysitters your whole life?" Connor asked. They turned off the main road into an alley beside his Tube stop.

"A bit. Could be worse, though." She reached into her purse and gripped her wand.

He reached out and captured her wrist. "Are you sure you're all right to Apparate? Wouldn't want you splinching yourself."

"I'm fine." Lily touched her left index finger to her nose. "See? Thanks for tonight, Connor."

"Sure thing, love. I'll send Quentin after you with a list of classes by next week."

"Brilliant!" Lily stood on tiptoe and brushed an alcohol-laden kiss against his stubbly cheek before closing her eyes and turning, squeezing into no-space, and setting her feet on the floor of her living room.

"Lily." Harry sat on the sofa, his chin resting on his hands. "Have a seat, please."

She sighed and crossed to the armchair by the fireplace. Ginny appeared in the doorway, her expression fiery. "Where have you been? Victoire said that you left at _five_, saying you had to be home. It is," she glanced at the watch on her wrist, "eleven fifty."

"I ran into a friend. We lost track of time." She tucked her hands between her knees and prayed that neither of her parents got near enough to smell the smoke on her. She ought to have cast a few cautionary spells before Apparating.

"Nearly seven hours worth?" Ginny asked. She moved to sit beside Harry, who was watching Lily with his green eyes narrowed.

"This wouldn't be a problem if it didn't happen so frequently," Harry pointed out. "We never know where you're going or who you're with or when you'll be home. Even James kept us more informed than you do."

Beginning at age thirteen, James had had a story every time he left the house, but the stories were never true. Lily wasn't about to break James's confidences now, but a part of her wished she could have. "I forget that I have to tell you things when I'm home," Lily said instead. "I never have to check with anyone when I'm at school."

"That's because, when you're at school, you're supposed to go to classes and meals and Slytherin Common Room and Hogsmeade _only on Hogsmeade weekends_," Ginny reminded her.

Lily looked at her dad. He was biting back a grin, she could tell from the way his jaw had tensed. Harry nudged Ginny and she glanced at him for a moment, then looked at Lily and dropped her head into her hands.

"Oh, bloody," she mumbled, trailing off on the list of swear words that were nearly enough to make even Lily squirm. "I know it's terribly hypocritical of me," she said finally, "but I just get worried about you, Lil."

"I'm fine," Lily promised. "I'm never in any danger." And she got into less trouble than either of her brothers had, probably less than her parents had, so really, she thought, they had no reason to be concerned.

"The fact that you could be, though," Harry said, "is worrying."

"I'm fine," Lily repeated. "I always am. I'll try to let you know where I'm going from now on, though."

Ginny and Harry looked at each other for a long moment, and Lily bit her lip. "All right," Ginny said. "All right, it's all right, this time. But even while you're at school, Lil, will you please try to stay at Hogwarts. Please."

Lily nodded. "Sure, of course." She stood up, brushed her hands on her jeans, and crossed the living room without getting too near her parents. "I'm just going to head up to bed. Goodnight."

Her parents said, "Night," in response, and watched as she left the room. She went into Teddy's room, next, where he lay, silent and still, like always. She brushed her hand through his brown hair, so strands stuck with static to her fingers, and she whispered, "I'm going to get there, Ted, I swear."


	3. Chapter Two

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Harry Potter_.  
**A/N:** Now that it's summer, I'm trying to do a better job of updating this. Hopefully the next chapter will be up by Thursday! Thank you for reading, and terribly sorry for how long it's taken me to post this chapter.

Chapter Two

On her last significant first of September, Lily sat alone by a smoke-smeared window on the Hogwarts Express. She risked occasional glances out at the Platform. It was starting to empty and she crossed her fingers, hoping that no one would try to share her compartment.

People passed in the corridor, but no one stopped. Last year, before everything had fallen apart, Lily's would have been the most crowded compartment on the train. If things hadn't changed, she, Ris, Bea, and Hugo would have been at the centre of a tornado of laughter, a maelstrom of noise. But Lily had fucked up, and so she supposed that Ris and Bea and Hugo had their compartment at the back of the train, and she had this one at the front, to herself. That was the way things had to be, she told herself, and that was the way she was going to leave them. She was fine with it, really. One more year of it, and she'd be free. If she cured Teddy, maybe then she'd even feel absolved.

The train let off its familiar whistle and King's Cross drifted past the window. Lily leaned against it, watching the billow of steam as they rolled through a tunnel and out of London. She crossed her fingers as they hit the rolling hills, hoping she'd see the city again before the end of the year. Within weeks, if Connor got back to her.

The train set off over a river and someone tapped at the glass door to her compartment. Hugo stood there, looking odd and unfamiliar and separate from her.

Lily slid the compartment door open. "Hi."

"Hey." He ran one hand through his red curls. "Can I come in?"

Lily stepped away and pressed her back against the window. The two cousins faced each other across the tiny space, each waiting for the other to say something.

"What's up?" Lily asked, finally, feeling the bounce of the train in every bone, the awkwardness in the tenseness of her shoulders.

Hugo sighed. "I don't know how to talk to you anymore."

This was understandable, Lily thought. The last time they had talked, back in October of the year before, they had shouted at each other so loudly that they had almost caused the Great Hall to collapse. Or that's how it seemed at the time, with all of the students silent over their dinners and her and Hugo's voices echoing among the stars in the vaulted ceiling.

"I know," was all she said.

"But I wanted to talk to you," Hugo continued, "about what happened last year."

"I'm not sure that's a good idea."

"Don't you miss me at all?" He shut his eyes, like he was waiting for her to hit him. She hated how he was acting as if he was afraid of her.

"Of course I do," she burst. "I've never—Hugo, I miss you like I'd miss the sun. But you shouldn't miss me. I'm still the same person I was last year."

"You can't tell me how I should feel," he said. "And are you saying you've learned nothing, that you haven't changed at all?"

"Just because I'm not telling lies about you and Ris," the confession tasted so awful, coming up again, "doesn't mean that I'm a better person than I was." His expression had soured, but she carried on. "It just means that I'm quieter."

"So you're saying you would do it again? Tell people all that stuff about us, just so we had no one to go to _but _you?" His voice was hard, and she was remembering that last fight. How horrible it had been, when Ris and Bea overheard someone gossiping about what they'd heard about Hugo's summer, about how he had slept with that Muggle girl, even though he and Ris seemed like they were perfect, and _of course_it was true, they'd heard it from Lily Potter herself.

Of course it was true, because everything Lily Potter said about her best friends was true—except that none of it was. Even now, Lily wasn't sure of the purpose of that lie, and the smaller ones that preceded it. It had all been about power, that she knew. She had wanted to be the one in control, and Hugo and Ris had seemed as if they were drifting away from her—but the lie had only made it worse, as she should have known that it would. Bea and Ris confronted Hugo, and Hugo met her in the Great Hall on a night in October and the whole stupid thing shattered. Lily had fled silence, had used popularity to build her own world, and then had lost it all. Had deserved to lose it all.

"Of course I wouldn't do it again," she told Hugo. "But I still did it. I don't deserve to be forgiven for that. You shouldn't even be here." Lily glanced at the corridor through the glass behind him. "Go back to Ris and Bea and the others. You'll be free of me in a year."

"You don't get it," Hugo ground out. "You were my best friend, Lily. You are my cousin. Honestly, I couldn't be free of you, even if I wanted to be. I _miss _you. What you did—I don't get it, but it's over. I don't feel angry over it anymore. I just feel...I feel so damn sad."

"I can't." Lily turned around, touched her nose to the window, stared at the hills moving past.

"Why not?" Hugo had a hand on her shoulder, was holding tight. "I just don't get it, Lily. Why, if you miss us too, why block us all out? We're over it."

The mention of the others, the inclusion of Ris and Bea in that "we," in that "us," drew Lily's heart into a tight aching mess. She remembered the way it was, before she lost herself, how easy it had been to feel close to her friends. She pulled out of Hugo's grip and faced him, blinking back tears.

"I _can't_," she repeated. "I can't, because I still don't know why I did it in the first place. What if..." she fell off. "I'm not a good person to know, Hugo. Just let it go."

"The point is that you stopped doing it. That you won't do it again. That I should not just let seventeen years of friendship _go_."

"The point is," Lily pressed her hands against Hugo's shoulders, pushed him backwards across the compartment, "that I think you should. I am so sorry, Hugo, but I fucked up too much, okay?"

"So, what, you'll never have friends again?" he asked from the corridor, his voice bitter.

"Not friends like we were." She slid the compartment shut and sat on the floor, her back against the seat and her knees against her chest. She had found a balance, after the fallout, and now, with her determination to cure Teddy, she had a purpose, and she couldn't risk going backwards, even if it did mean that she would have been happier.

Hugo insisted on saying hi when he passed Lily in the hallways. That first week he occasionally crossed the hall and sat near her at the Slytherin table. Lily overheard whispers among the other students, people wondering whether she and her friends had reunited over the summer. She never responded to him, though, didn't look up when he sat two seats down, even though his rightful place was at the Ravenclaw table, or beside Ris, who was rarely at mealtimes when Lily was.

He was sitting at the Slytherin table on the morning Quentin brought her a note from Connor. The barn owl straightened his feathers on Lily's breakfast plate, and she could feel Hugo's gaze on her as she slit the envelope and pulled out Quentin's letter.

_Lily — _  
_I still don't get why you want to take classes here, but there are a few large lecture classes most nights. There are only three that are held in buildings you don't need an ID card to get into, though (although I'm sure you could Charm your way in, I think it might be better if you used as little magic as possible). On Mondays there's Intro to Anatomy, Wednesdays there's Molecular Biology, and Thursdays are Organic Chemistry, which sounds horrid. They're all from 7-10 pm, in a building near the Admissions office. If you let me know which one you're coming to, I can meet you there and take you. And you'll bring the cigs, of course. _  
_Looking forward to seeing you. Good luck sneaking out._  
_— Connor_

Lily grinned and folded the paper, and she almost said hi in response when Hugo muttered it at her as she passed his seat. She caught herself, but she knew he was watching her as she left the Great Hall, trying to sort out who had sent a letter that had almost turned her normal again.

Lily decided to go to Anatomy. She thought that Molecular Biology might possibly be more useful for Teddy's problem, but it sounded horribly confusing, and chances were it would take her more than one term to sort out how to fix him anyway, so she thought she might as well get a basis. The "intro" before Anatomy sounded much more inviting. It wasn't as if Teddy was going anywhere; he was in a stasis, no improvements, but it seemed as if there were no complications, either.

That first Monday, she snuck out of school wearing her father's old invisibility cloak, and as soon as she was on the path to Hogsmeade, outside of Hogwarts grounds, she Apparated to a familiar alleyway in London. Waiting until she was certain there was no one else around, she shrugged the cloak from her shoulders, stuffed it into her bag, and hurried down the crowded pavement toward the Admissions building.

Connor was there, leaning against the wall and tapping one hand in a restless rhythm against the bricks. "Lil!" He hurried toward her, grabbed her in a one-armed hug while his other hand slipped into the front pocket of her jeans and pulled out a box of cigarettes. He pressed a kiss to her hair just as she pushed him off.

"Fuck off, Connor. You've got what you came for. Where is this building?"

"A few blocks that way." He pointed his thumb behind them. "So, how is seventh year starting out?"

"You know, normally." She followed him along the street. "I'm just looking forward to it being over. How about you, how's your last year going?"

"It's all right. No idea what I'm doing when it's over, of course. Maybe I'll go back and get a history degree. But my flat is fun—you really should come by sometime, Lil."

"I'm already taking a big risk sneaking out once a week. Maybe over Christmas hols?"

"That might be good. Here's the building. It's in the lecture hall on the ground floor—take a right as soon as you get in, and it should be at the end of that hall. I'll meet you out here, after, if you want to go out?" He leaned forward, lowering his voice. "I know of this wizarding pub that's way beyond anything you'll find in Hogsmeade or Diagon Alley."

"It's a Monday, Connor. I've got work for school after this. Maybe some other time." Lily moved toward the door of the large stone building, and turned back to see Connor watching her. "Thank you, really."

"Anytime, Lil. In a few weeks, you'll be begging to come out with me." She thought he was probably right.

Lily's weeks turned into a whirl of Muggleness and magic. Through her Anatomy class she learned that there were fourteen systems of the human body, and that the one most likely affected by Teddy's potion had been the circulatory system and perhaps the lymphatic system, but that his nervous system in general had been compromised (a beautiful word for a terrible event, she thought) in the preceding years, and that, as such, there was a good chance that Teddy might actually die long before the healers had told her parents that he would.

Through her courses at Hogwarts she learned that she and Charms had somehow parted ways and that she and Transfiguration had possibly reached their peak, and that she really did not give a damn about much in any of her other classes. It seemed unfair that her studying of the human body—such a beautifully intriguing and useful thing—was limited to three hours on Monday nights and stolen minutes in the early mornings, whereas her studies of how to transform desks into animals—while interesting in a theoretical but mostly useless way—was spread to seemingly limitless hours throughout her weeks. She was driving herself mad with the desire to be scribbling fast notes at the back of a lecture class. The only class at Hogwarts that even began to approach the usefulness of Anatomy was Potions, and it wasn't as if they studied the making of underground potions, so even that was of a more theoretical value than anything else.

Lily lasted until mid October before agreeing to go out with Connor, and he was exultantly gleeful when she sent him an owl early on that Monday—he met her outside of the lecture hall at 10:00 and brushed a light kiss on her lips and grabbed her hand in his before she could react.

"I was thinking all day about where we ought to go," he said as he pulled her through the other students issuing from the building, down a narrow alley and out into a brightly lit street. "And I know I swore I'd take you to that wizarding pub but there's this truly brilliant Muggle one that my friends brought me to a few weeks ago and as it's Monday it'll probably be very quiet, so I thought that might be nice. Sound good?"

"Lovely," Lily told him, fumbling in her bag to slip her wand deeper beneath her notebooks as Connor led her through another alley.

Lily got a pint of Strongbow and leaned against the bar, her head tilted in interest as Connor told her about his literature classes.

"And of course," he wound down, "no one really realises that Coleridge was a wizard, you know, so much of his fantastic work was based in reality and it's so enthralling, the way Muggles make up such intricate explanations for the obvious magical origins, I just love it."

He'd been speaking loudly, and Lily could feel the few other people in the bar glance at them at the end of that exclamation, so she placed a hand on his arm and smiled, murmuring, "It _sounds _enthralling, love," as if calming him. The others turned away, and she continued, "This Anatomy course I'm taking is so much more interesting than anything we've _ever _learnt at Hogwarts, I swear. I wish I could just go to all of these classes, you know? Merlin, it'd be so fucking brilliant."

"It is really really nice. You could, though, you know? After you leave Hogwarts, I mean. It's not too tricky to forge the necessary documents—there's a whole department in the Ministry dedicated to getting students like us into Muggle institutions—and it'd prevent you from needing to return home after you graduate, or find work right away."

Lily imagined it for a moment. It seemed a blissful opportunity—a chance to start over—and then shook her head. "I can't. Not right now, anyway."

"Why not?" He was focused on her, dark eyes catching the way hers flicked sideways when she spoke.

"I need to go home after graduation. I need to—I have something I need to do."

Connor laughed, a low chuckle building in the moments following the rush of her words. "Merlin, Lil, so mysterious." She opened her mouth to respond, but he shook his head. "No, it's fine, you'll tell me when you want to—probably when you need my help—but whatever. It's just, if you have something you want to keep hidden, you should probably figure out a better way of talking about it. I'd have thought you'd have the lying thing down."

Lily drew a happy face in the condensation on her glass. "I have the lying thing down, it's the secret thing I don't do well."

"Well, they tend to go together. If you're halfway there, that's progress, at least." Connor glanced at his watch. "It's getting pretty late. I should probably let you get back to school. Come out again next week, though?"

"Sure thing."

The next week, they went to the wizarding pub, and the night was crazier; Lily Apparated back to Hogsmeade still drunk, and the next morning she woke up to a terrible headache and a feeling like a whirlpool in her stomach.

It was while she was still in the throes of her hangover that Lily decided she had to see Teddy. She was sitting at the breakfast table, trying to force herself to eat toast and eggs, and flipping through her notes from the last few Anatomy classes. She wanted to know what, exactly, she was dealing with. Her knowledge of Teddy's case was limited to snippets of conversation she'd overheard, and if she could just see him, now, with her notes and textbook beside her, she hoped that she could come up with some sort of plan.

But Teddy was at home and she was at school, and as far as she knew asking for leave during the school term was fairly unprecedented. She speared her egg so the yolk ran over her toast and wondered what would constitute a suitable excuse for returning home.

Hugo sat beside her as she was mulling this over, and he leaned into her space and said, "I've given you quite a lot of time, Lily."

She shoved her plate away and stood. "I didn't ask you for time." But when she turned around, Ris lingered there, leaning against the wall with her arms folded, and Lily felt inexplicably cornered.

"I forgive you too, Lil." Ris stepped forward. "In case Hugo hadn't made that clear, earlier."

"And I still say that neither of you should have forgiven me. I don't deserve it." The whirlpool in her gut had turned stagnant and Lily's head felt full.

"Of course you don't, but _we _have forgiven you, anyway. Can't things just go back to normal, Lily?" Ris stuck her hands on her hips and Lily wanted, desperately, to go back a year or two.

"No, not now." Not ever. "I need to go." She skirted around Ris and Hugo and made it to the main staircase before she was really certain of where she was going, and then Professor Greengrass was at the top of the steps, and she hurried to get in her way.

"Miss Potter? May I help you?"

"Yes, please, Professor. I was wondering if I could ask you a question."

"Well," Professor Greengrass stepped beside Lily and gestured for her to follow her down the stairs, "go ahead and ask. I can't promise I'll answer it."

"I've been having a pretty rough term," not exactly a lie, "and I was wondering if there would be any way for me to go home for a weekend, sometime this month. Maybe next week?"

"Hmmm." The other woman stopped at the foot of the stairs and turned to face Lily. "I know that you have had a difficult time maintaining friendships since you and Parkinson and Zabini stopped speaking last year, but do you really think that leaving school is the best way to find new friends?"

Lily bristled. "I don't _need _friends. I need..." and then she caught the worry behind her professor's eyes and calmed herself, taking a few quick breaths, "I just really want to go home for a few days."

Her professor tilted her head, considering. "I'll speak with the headmaster about it and let you know. As long as it's only one weekend, I don't believe that it'll be a problem. You can Floo out of my office."

"Thank you." Lily felt lighter, suddenly, and the terrible ache in her head lessened slightly.

"Of course, Miss Potter. And," Professor Greengrass glanced around, blonde hair swinging, "if you ever feel the need to talk, my office is open for you." She hurried down the stairs to the dungeons with a smile over her shoulder, and Lily felt an irrational burst of affection for the usually quiet Charms professor.

She was allowed home two weekends later, and her parents met her at the fireplace with faces full of concern.

"I'm _fine_," she told them. "I just really needed some quiet, and I couldn't get it at school," and her father went to make her some tea and her mum kept watching her all night, as if she was about to break into pieces, and she didn't get to see Teddy until around midnight, long after both her parents had retired to bed.

She crept down the stairs and into Teddy's bedroom, flicked on the lamp on the desk, and turned to look at him in the dim amber glow.

He looked improbably thinner. His breath was heavy in the silent room, and she moved to sit beside his bed, reaching beneath the covers to take his pulse, the way she'd read in her textbooks, and was horrified at the weak flutter of it beneath his cool skin.

"Oh, Teddy," she murmured. "You are getting worse, aren't you?" So much for stasis; Lily was terrified of running out of time.

She squeezed his hand before returning to the desk, undoing the locking charms on the drawers, and pulling out the folders marking his progress—lack of progress—since the accident nine years before. Lily sat down on the desk chair and began reading, taking notes down occasionally, and she began to see that she might have been right in thinking that she could wake him up.


	4. Chapter Three

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Harry Potter_.  
**A/N:** There are some things about medicine/biology/phlebotomy in this chapter, and my knowledge in this area is mostly limited to high school biology classes and skimming Wikipedia articles, so I apologize if I made any mistakes. Please do let me know if you spot any serious discrepancies. Thank you for reading!

Chapter Three

The papers on Teddy were detailed. They listed thousands (well, perhaps not thousands—dozens would be a more accurate approximation) of magical remedies that various healers had administered to Teddy over the years. They listed zero responses to these supposed fixes. They listed hundreds (actually) of conjectures over what had caused the coma. Some touched on his father's lycanthropy, most on his potions-use, some on his potion-brewing. None dipped below his physical state. None involved the admittedly vulgar—but often, Lily thought, effective—process of examining blood or excrement or mucus.

Lily flipped the folder shut at five in the morning, locked it back in its drawer, took her notes in her hands, and stood by Teddy's bed. "They've fucked you over, is my personal opinion," she told her sleeping god-brother. "I mean, honestly, Ted. Not even _looking_ at your blood. How ridiculous that they expected to save you."

Ridiculous, that everyone had believed that they—the innumerable healers Harry had called in—could possibly revive this beautiful skeleton of a man. Lily, though. She didn't have the knowledge for it, not quite yet, but when she got it; well, he would either die or wake up.

She returned to her bedroom, slipping her notes beneath her robes in her bag and curling exhausted on her covers. She slept until her mum tapped on her door, sometime past noon, with a cup of coffee and some toast, and later Lily was treated to an afternoon tea that involved her parents looking at her over the chipped rims of mugs, waiting for her to say something appropriately earth-shattering. A weekend home in the middle of term surely meant disaster.

But Lily just repeated what she had told them the night before and her parents nodded slowly. "So you're just going to stay in tonight?" her mum asked. "Write your essays?"

"That's the plan." Lily shoved a scone around her plate—the one with a chip along the rim from the time Albus had attempted using it as a discus, and ended up hitting Lily in the forehead. She still had a scar from it, white and raised above her left eyebrow.

"There's a Ministry fundraiser, with dinner and dancing and an orchestra, tonight, if you'd like to take a break," her dad said, and Lily smiled across the small table at him. She'd loved those, when she was little. They'd given her the chance to dress up, to be seen at her very best, when the papers were always looking for her at her worst; she'd loved it all. And the food, the dancing, the music, she'd hungered to get lost among the gem-coloured dress robes and had adored being pampered by her father's co-workers.

At seventeen, though, the idea of spending an evening among the very richest of wizarding society left her feeling slightly panicky. So she smiled at her father, but she also shook her head and said, "Thanks, Daddy, but I think I'd really better stay in tonight."

"Of course." Harry turned to Ginny. "Please say you'll come? It'll be miserable."

"Really selling it, Harry." Ginny smiled, and set her teacup down on an empty plate, said, "But I suppose I'll come. I'd hate for you to go mad without me."

Lily took the dishes to the sink and washed them, and then she locked herself in her room, where she worked on a paper for Potions for barely fifteen minutes before delving into one of the textbooks for her Anatomy class.

It didn't help much, and she Apparated from her bedroom to London almost the moment her parents departed for their party. The University library required an ID card to enter, but Lily managed to Charm her way in, and then she was free to peruse their nearly-overwhelming collection of medical textbooks. She found one on the circulatory and lymphatic systems, which included a dense chapter on phlebotomy, and snuck out a side exit with the book under her arm.

She read it sitting beside Teddy, his sleeping form a stabilizing feature in the whirl of diagrams of veins and needles, of all the important rhythms that occurred, or were meant to occur, beneath any given person's skin. Beneath Teddy's skin, although she was beginning to doubt whether all of the blood vessels were getting carried in the proper way, through beautifully red arteries and blue veins, bringing in oxygen and all of that. According to the healers, Teddy was perfectly healthy, except he wasn't waking up. According to Lily's research, Teddy was dying.

Lily slid the book into her bag that night and returned to school with it the next day. She knew that somehow she needed to learn _more_ than any textbook could tell her, but if she'd learned anything from her aunt Hermione, she'd learned that books usually made reasonable beginnings.

For the rest of that term, Lily abused herself. She stopped going out with Connor on Mondays after class, she existed on coffee and toast, and she practically lived in an abandoned Charms classroom, textbooks spread around her and papers piled in front of her. She gained a permanent smudge of ink in the very corner of her lip, from chewing on her quill, and she spent stolen Saturdays in London, sunk among books and computers in the University library, sorting out exactly how one would go about identifying problems in the blood.

Hugo, Ris, and Beatrice still said hi to her when they passed her in the corridors. They still sat beside her in classes they shared, and Ris and Bea frequently lingered by the end of Lily's bed in the Slytherin dormitory, chatting and casting glances toward Lily as she feigned sleep. She refused to respond: She was not good for friendship, and she hadn't even atoned for her lies. Not yet, anyway.

Ris found her in the Charms classroom at the very end of term, when she was hurriedly finishing up a terrible essay for Potions, thankfully, and her Muggle textbooks were hidden beneath several stained Potions ones.

Ris leaned against the door, not quite stepping inside the classroom, and Lily turned in her seat, looking at her from across the quiet room.

"Are you ever going to give in?" Ris asked, as if Lily had been trying to prove a point, all these months.

Lily twisted a red curl around her finger; she bit her lip so the ink stain on her face became more pronounced. "I'm not being stubborn," she said, even though she admitted to herself that maybe she was, "I just think you all should be through with me."

"That's what you told Hugo, too, but Lily, we don't want to be 'through' with you." Her pale fingers made hasty air quotes.

How had she made such an utter mess of things? Lily could have listed off the reasons that her old friends ought to sever all ties with her—some of which she was sure Ris was not even aware of—she could have told Ris that she, Lily, was through with them, Hugo and Ris and Bea, she could have said that she was happy alone, happy in this silent world she'd made for herself: Lily and books, Lily and blood, Lily and medicine, Lily and a sleeping patient.

Instead of saying any of that, Lily shook her head and said, "And like I told Hugo, you _should_," and then she turned back to her essay and ignored Ris until the other girl left.

It truly seemed pointless to her, to try to atone something her friends didn't even seem to think about anymore, but Lily could not push aside the things that she had done, could not imagine being herself around Ris and Hugo and Bea, and so she barricaded herself behind her textbooks and plans, and was unsurprised but surprisingly unhappy when her friends stopped trying after Ris found her in the Charms classroom.

Christmas holidays came and ended Lily's foray into Muggle schooling. She wanted to take Intro to Biology, the next term, but it had a lab course attached to it, which included extra fees, which meant that Lily would have had to make herself an official student—an impossibility if she remained at Hogwarts for her final term. Instead, she signed up for a first aid course, which met every other Saturday throughout the months of February through April, and she told Connor that she might spend a few weekends camped on his sofa, so she could study in the University library on Sundays, too.

But before all that began Lily had a glorious two weeks at home, and her Aunt Hermione and Uncle Ron had taken Hugo and Rose off to visit their grandparents at their retirement home in Australia, and so Lily did not even need to worry about an awful Christmas akin to the one before, where she had needed to avoid Hugo while trying not to alert her family that they'd had a falling-out—a largely unsuccessful endeavour, as it turned out.

Albus and James were returning from Scotland and India, respectively, on Christmas Eve, and Lily's parents were going mad trying to repair the various leaks and cracks that had sprung up in the boys' bedrooms over the year. The holidays began in a soft flurry of snow, and Lily spent her first evening going throughout her house, patching up areas where the wind blew vicious through cracks in the roof and windows, because her mother wanted the house snug.

The next night Lily avoided her mother, poured a mug of spiced cider from the pot her father had set on the stove, and slipped into Teddy's bedroom. He was breathing but not moving, as always. As always—Lily hated that thought, the idea of always, of a forever (a finite forever, though, one whose end seemed to be approaching more rapidly every time she saw Teddy) involving the man asleep, quiet.

She tugged back the covers and felt for his wrist, her fingers settling against the pulse while he breathed steady but shallowly. Her hand was warm from the cider, and his skin felt all the cooler for it. But his pulse hadn't slowed from the last time she'd been home, and Lily thought that maybe he'd make it until she knew exactly how to help him.

Lily wanted two things: She wanted a stethoscope and she wanted some of Teddy's blood.

The first she could obtain fairly easily; in fact, that was her plan for the second full day of her holidays, a trip into Muggle London and a stop at the Blackwell's near the University—they had that awkward cubby full of newly white lab coats and file folders, and Lily remembered seeing the black rubber y-shaped tree of a stethoscope there the last time she'd stopped by, at the beginning of the autumn term.

The blood would be more difficult, of course, more difficult and more important. She wanted a vial of Teddy's (most likely poisoned) blood so she could look at it through a microscope (or, actually, through a spell she'd learned from a particularly terrible book she'd found in the Restricted Section at the end of the term, but it would do the same thing as a microscope) and decipher what had happened to Teddy's supposedly circular, donut-shaped, healthy red blood cells. She highly doubted that they were circular, donut-shaped, or healthy.

Lily did not envy the idea of obtaining a needle and slipping it beneath Teddy's skin, between the two walls of one of the faint violet-blue veins just below the pale crease of his elbow. She did not _want_ to do that, because she wasn't entirely sure she knew how to do such a thing, and because she did not want her parents to walk in on her while she had a needle in Teddy's arm, and because the thought of it made her vaguely nauseous. But she did not know how else to get blood from him; the book with the spell for simulating a microscope had included a spell for removing blood, but it seemed both messier and riskier than the Muggle route.

She desperately wished she could take him to a Muggle hospital and have them run tests on him, but she knew that whatever was wrong with his blood could cause an uproar in Muggle hospitals, and so she pressed her fingers against the skin where she imagined she'd eventually need to slip a needle, and apologised to him as best she could, in silence.

:::

Connor met Lily for dinner the next evening, after she'd picked up a stethoscope and a new book on phlebotomy (with the terrifying subtitle: "Vein Cutting for the Modern Medic"), both of which she slid into her bag before arriving at the pub where Connor was waiting.

He stood when Lily arrived, gripped her gloved hand in one of his, and kissed her on the very top of her red head.

"Happy Christmas," he said as they both sat down. "I tried to order you a drink, but they're being difficult about IDs. Do you have yours?" By which he meant Molly's.

Lily nodded. "Obviously." She glanced through the menu and looked up to find Connor watching her. "What's up, Connor? I haven't seen you in weeks."

"Whose fault is that?" He shook his head. "Sorry, I don't mean to accuse you. It's just, what happened this term? You seemed all right at the beginning, but now," he gestured at her, and she knew she looked a little messy. The ink stain by her mouth seemed as if it had turned permanent, and she'd lost weight in the last few weeks—she'd had weight to lose, but not that much, and she knew she looked a little as if she could be blown away—and her hair was more tangled than curly.

"Honest?" Lily glanced around, then leaned across the table. "You know my god-brother?"

"Teddy Lupin? Of course I know him. We were at Hogwarts together, remember?"

"For one year," Lily ceded; Connor was six years younger than Teddy, four years older than Lily, and seemingly caught in a stage of perpetual university attendance.

"Yeah, well, he was dating Victoire at the time, so everyone was sort of obsessed with them. They were like celebrities, you know?" Of course she did, because she was, herself. Connor caught the implication in her hard stare and hurried, "Of course you know. And Lupin was so good at everything—the whole school was jealous of him. And then he went off and got mixed up in all those hallucinatory potions, took a bad one, and fell off the face of the planet. Or that's the story I heard," he added, because Lily's eyes had shut briefly.

"We're still not really sure what caused it," probably one of the potions, but no one knew, except according to the case notes there'd been a cut on his hand and fairly noxious smelling fumes in the kitchen of Grimmauld Place, "but he's been in a coma for the past nine years. He lives," never the right word, "in my parents' house."

"Oh, fuck," Connor's hands fisted around each other on the table, and Lily wanted, at that moment, to never need to leave the warmth of that pub and the compassion in his curse, "that's a rough deal."

"It is," Lily sipped water from the dripping glass on the table and forged on, "anyway, no one's been able to help, but _I _think no one's been looking in the right places, or at the right things, and so that's what I've been trying to do."

"You're trying to bring Lupin back to life?" Connor's voice relayed his incredulity.

"I'm trying to wake Teddy up," Lily corrected.

"Well," Connor paused, his lower lip caught between his teeth, and Lily wished for a moment that she hadn't told him, "have you had any luck yet?"

"I'm getting closer. The thing is," Lily leaned across the table, lowering her voice, "I think it's something to do with his blood. The healers never even _looked_ at his blood, which is such a terrible omission, you can't even…but, anyway, the problem is, I can't just get at his blood, you know?"

Connor pressed his hands together in front of his face. "You don't know how to use a needle, you mean?"

"Exactly that." Lily stared at him, noticed the way his eyes glanced at her hands folded in front of her, at their glasses of water, and then up at her face. "You don't, do you?"

"Not…well, sort of." He shrugged. "There was a period after Hogwarts, when I got into some shady stuff—Muggle stuff, you know? And I learned about using needles then. I've only drawn blood once, but…I think I could manage it again. If you're sure—are you sure? Do you think you can save him?"

Lily sipped her water while digesting the idea of Connor taking Muggle drugs, shooting up, doing terrible things to his mind, and then she realised that that really wasn't too different from what Teddy and Graham (and, allegedly, Victoire) had gotten up to, at the end. And so she set down her water glass, reached one cold hand for one of Connor's, and said, "I really think I can, if I can get a look at his blood."

"Well, then," Connor squeezed her hand, "I think I can help you out."

:::

Lily's parents went out Christmas shopping late on the night before Christmas Eve, and Lily flooed Connor immediately. He fell into her parents' living room, glanced around, and then smiled at Lily, looking a little wide-eyed with shock.

"So, you have a needle and a syringe, right? And they're clean?"

"Never been used before." He pulled the sealed bag from his pocket and handed to Lily, who glanced at it and then returned it to him, saying, "Come with me."

Teddy's door was open, and Connor stopped in the doorway, staring for a moment before entering the room. "Christ, he looks like hell."

"I know," Lily murmured, crossing the room and brushing some of Teddy's dull hair from his forehead. "But he can get better." Or die, she thought, which she still would have considered an improvement, had she been in Teddy's place.

"Well, all right." Connor's hands were shaking, and Lily reached out and snagged his right wrist in one of hers.

"Thank you so much for this, Connor. I swear, I will never tell anyone that you helped me."

"It's funny," he said, as he tugged some rubber gloves and a small rubber strip from his pocket, laying that on the cover beside Teddy's arm and slipping the gloves over his hands, "that I feel worse about this than I ever did about injecting heroin into my own veins, or my friends'."

Lily bit the inside of her cheek and picked up a glass vial from the desk. It was already prepared with a Refrigeration Charm, which the book from the Restricted Section had informed her was essential. Lily didn't know what to say to Connor, so she didn't say anything.

He glanced at her, smiled, and secured the rubber band around Teddy's arm, gesturing for Lily to lift Teddy up by his shoulders—he was too light, too light—so his arm bent and the vein on the underside swelled blue. "Shouldn't be too hard," he said, and Lily knew he was reassuring himself more than her.

Connor asked her for disinfectant, and she handed him Muggle alcohol from the bedside table, a requisite solution from her childhood, and he swabbed Teddy's arm, and then he shut his eyes for the barest moment, undid the knot of the tourniquet, pressed his thumb against Teddy's skin, and in a quick motion slid the needle into the blueish line. He drew the syringe out, and the plastic tube filled with blood.

Lily had seen blood before, of course. Bright and falling from scrapes on her legs, hands, fast and into her eyes from the cut on her forehead. She'd seen it drip from brothers' split lips and cousins' elbows and friends' skinned knees; but it had never looked as dark and purple-ish red as the tube of Teddy's blood that Connor handed her, after pulling the needle from Teddy's arm and dabbing at the dot of blood still on his skin with an antiseptic wipe.

Lily transferred his blood to the glass vial, and it filled the clear jar completely. She sealed it with a stopper and a charm, and placed it on Teddy's desk. Connor and she Banished all evidence—Lily had never been certain where Banished items went, but she was fairly certain it was somewhere no person could follow—and then they washed Teddy's arm, which had stopped bleeding, and Lily cast a Hydration Charm on him, which she was not supposed to know how to do, but she had seen enough healers cast them on Teddy over the years that she wasn't entirely sure how she was meant to have avoided picking it up. His skin looked healthy—or healthy for Teddy—and there was no way that anyone, not Teddy's healer, nor Lily's parents, nor Vic and Graham, who were sure to stop by the next day—no one, would know that Lily and Connor had stolen some of Teddy's blood.

"Where are you going to experiment on it?" Connor asked as Lily fixed him some tea in her parents' kitchen. "Not at Hogwarts?"

"No, not at Hogwarts." Lily stirred some sugar into Connor's cup and glanced at the vial of blood sitting on the table. "I'm going to break into Grimmauld Place—my father inherited from his godfather, and Teddy and Graham lived there for a bit. I don't think anyone's been there since Graham moved out after the—after whatever happened to Teddy, but I know technically it still belongs to my parents. I know all of their security Charms, so it shouldn't be terribly difficult to get in."

Connor caught the mug from where she sent it floating towards him, and he shook his head. "Fuck, that's brave. You don't think your parents have some sort of surveillance on the place?"

"Honestly, not really. It's protected—you know, Secret-Keeper and all that. If you went to Grimmauld Place, you wouldn't see it. Only a few of Teddy and Graham's friends were even allowed to know the address." Lily shrugged. "I don't think my parents feel it needs surveillance, which is good for me."

"So you'll, what, turn it into your laboratory?"

"What better place, really?" Lily snagged the blood from the table and turned toward the stairs. "I'll be back down in a minute, I just want to grab a bag."

"Are you coming home with me?" Connor called after her.

Lily reappeared a moment later, wearing a wool jacket and with a bag slung across her chest, one which Connor assumed held the vial of Teddy's blood, and she shook her head. "I'm coming to London with you, but I want to make it over to Grimmauld Place and back before my parents get home, so I won't be able to stay. Finish up your tea, doll."

"Why make it for me if you won't give me the chance to drink it?" Connor winked at her.

Grimmauld Place had all of her parents' typical defences in place, and it was as dark and dusty as Lily could ever remember it being. There were still things of Teddy's strewn around the living room and hallway, and she caught sight of an old stuffed owl that she thought had belonged to her when she was little. No one, it seemed, had had the courage to face clearing out Teddy's things after the accident, and so they had locked them up, a hidden memorial for the sleeper.

There were still photographs decorating the walls, too, pictures of Teddy with a young-looking Victoire and Graham, with the other cousins, as a baby with Harry and Ginny and his grandmother. Lily felt as if she'd stepped years back in time, as if she had turned a Time-Turner.

But no, she reminded herself, as she descended into the kitchen, the place where Teddy had collapsed, this place may have stopped, but Teddy himself was certainly continuing on, and not well, not well, at all.

In addition to the vial of his blood, Lily had taken the best of her textbook collection. She lined them up on the dusty counter to the right of the sink, and set the blood beside them, double-checked to ensure that its Refrigeration and Protective Charms were still in place, set a few security spells of her own around the kitchen and the entrance to the house, and then Apparated home.

Her parents returned about ten minutes after she did, and she helped them wrap their gifts, and then, after they'd gone to bed, Lily crept into Teddy's room, checked his arm—the puncture wasn't even visible—and blew her hot breath onto the flat diaphragm of the stethoscope, warming it up before she slid it beneath Teddy's cotton shirt, against his pale skin.

His heartbeat was steady, a rhythm that matched the pulse she felt daily in his wrist and neck. She sat cross-legged on the bed beside him, breathing quietly as his heart thrummed in her ears. He was so very alive. She couldn't bear it, how alive he was, and how still.


	5. Chapter Four

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Harry Potter_.  
**A/N:** Again, there are some things about medicine/biology/phlebotomy in this chapter, and my knowledge in this area is mostly limited to high school biology classes and skimming Wikipedia articles, so I apologize if I made any mistakes. Please do let me know if you spot any serious discrepancies. Thank you for reading!

Chapter Four

Albus and James arrived home early the next morning, spilling out of the fireplace one after the other, laughing and talking over each other loud enough that Lily could hear them from Teddy's room. Albus asked, after assuring his parents that the Floo trip had been fine, "Where's the other one?"

"You mean your sister?" Harry chided, but Lily could hear the smile in his voice. She reached out and tapped two fingers against the back of Teddy's hand as a goodbye, as a promise to come back, and then hurried from his bedroom down the hall into the den.

"Here's the other one!"

"Lilykins!" Albus grabbed her around the waist and passed her to James, who rubbed his horrible new beard—it was ginger! Ginger, even though James's hair was barely auburn—against Lily's temple, and set her on her feet by the fireplace.

"Have you lost weight?" he asked as soon as he released her.

"Not much," Lily crossed her arms and tilted her head to look at her brothers. "That beard is awful and," she turned to Albus, who was sporting a bandage around his forehead, "what happened to you? Did you get in a pub brawl?"

"Of course not!" Albus looked affronted. "I fell down a hill chasing after a very rare dragon."

"Really, Al? You ought to have come up with a better story than that! You can't even walk right?"

Albus shoved her in the shoulder, and Harry used the silence to gather his sons' bags in one hand and gesture the group toward the stairs with the other. "I hate to rush you all, but the rest of the family should be getting here sometime in the early afternoon, and your mum's getting brunch on the table—she'll want you to eat it while it's still hot."

"Brill," Albus said, taking his bag from his dad's hand as he passed him, and James followed, clasping Harry on the shoulder before bounding up the stairs. Lily smiled at the look on her dad's face.

"Wonderful to have them home, isn't it?"

"Sarcasm is unbecoming, love." Harry reached to hold Lily in a one-armed hug and added, "What James said—Mum and I have noticed that you seem to have lost weight. Are you sure you're all right?"

Lily tensed. "I'm completely fine," she told him. "Honest."

Harry rested his cheek against the top of his head, said, "Well, if you ever decide you're not, you know we're here for you."

"I do know. Do you think Mum needs help?"

A smile caught at the corner of Harry's mouth. "I imagine she does." Ginny in the kitchen was often a disaster, but occasionally a miracle. Lily made it to the kitchen before the food caught fire.

Various members of the Weasley family stopped by that day, dropping in for a few hours of loud conversation, before rushing off to see the other sides of their families; Lily got in a row with Molly, as always seemed to happen, and James and Albus shouted at Louis for a good fifteen minutes over some girl he'd messed up, before the three raced out to the back garden for a quick game of Quidditch.

The house was returned to some semblance of normalcy by ten that night, when only Graham and Victoire still lingered in the Potters' living room. Harry and Ginny had escaped upstairs at some point during the mayhem of late-night cleanup, and James and Albus were sprawled on the carpet, while Lily curled in the armchair by the lit Christmas tree and Graham and Victoire curved around each other like quotation marks on the end of the sofa nearest the hall.

"Do you remember when we all really little," James began, and Albus rolled his eyes, so James interrupted himself, continuing, "No, seriously, Albus, stop looking like that. I mean, when we were all younger, and Dad used to read to us from _Tales of Beedle the Bard _every Christmas?"

Graham, who had spent nearly every Christmas that Lily could remember with their family, first attached to Teddy and then to Vic, smiled. "I do. That was the strangest thing about my first Christmas here, I think. Harry Potter reading children's stories—totally not what I was expecting."

Lily snorted into the pillow she held against her stomach.

"Well, I didn't know him them. He was still my childhood hero," Graham explained.

Lily didn't retract her snort and Albus rolled over onto his stomach, reaching to pluck a fallen pine needle from the carpet. "What happened to that book?"

"Don't you have it, Lil?" James asked.

"Let's read it," Vic suggested.

"Yes, let's." Albus jumped up in a sudden burst of energy. "Is it on your bookshelf, Lil?"

Lily had frozen, her arms around her legs and the lower half of her face buried in the pillow. She had not expected that book to get picked up by anyone by her, not unless something awful happened _to_ her, and she swung her legs down from the chair and said, fast, "I think so, I'll go get it."

She hurried up the stairs to her attic bedroom and scanned her bookshelf, catching sight of the worn book and slipping it from the shelf. She let it fall open to where she had stuck an envelope at age eight—an envelope addressed to Albus, asking him to kill her if she ended up in a coma—and tugged it from between the pages just as her brother appeared in the doorway.

"Find it? Excellent!" He came into her room and Lily stuffed the envelope out of sight on her desk, handing him the book with a shaking hand. He didn't seem to notice. Lily followed him downstairs and listened as he read from the stories, eventually falling asleep curled in the armchair, and not waking up until the sound of her parents brewing coffee reached her ears.

Christmas passed quickly, and soon it was just Lily, her parents, and their sleeping Teddy in the house again. Lily spent her days in Teddy's room, continuing her research with a new edge of desperation brought on by his soft breathing and his faint heartbeat.

:::

Returning to school felt almost like a punishment, and Lily may not have made it back had she not known that it was the last time. She fell into her classes a bit like a hiker falls in a landslide, and she stole away to London at the first opportunity.

Grimmauld Place was as dreary as she remembered, but as she sat in the kitchen making notes and plans, she began to feel calmer than she had since the summer, before she began thinking that she could help Teddy.

She drew a tiny amount of his blood out of the vial, her second weekend in Grimmauld Place, and cast the microscope charm over it. There was a sudden scent, a bit like the smell of leather, and then a magnified image of Teddy's blood hovered in front of her.

And it was...not right. Her textbook told her that red blood cells ought to have a pinkish colour, but Teddy's were more violet than pink. They were also slightly elongated, looking more like ovals than circles. Lily's breath escaped in a hiss.

"What the fuck did you do, Ted?"

None of the research she'd done had mentioned blood changing colours; admittedly, Muggle blood infections would never have prompted such a transformation, but Lily had checked quite a few books on wizard anatomy out from the Restricted Section, none of which had mentioned anything about the possibility that red blood cells could be purple.

Lily scribbled some notes and sketches in the margins of her textbook, beside the photograph of healthy blood cells, and Spelled the blood she'd examined into a second jar, which she set on the counter behind the still nearly-full vial of uncontaminated—by her—blood. She hopped off the table and looked around the empty room, wishing, not for the first time, that they had left _everything_ the way it was when Teddy collapsed. If she could just get a look at his potion—but of course, that had been cleaned up. In fact, none of the notes on Teddy had mentioned the contents of the potion he'd been working on; aside from the mention of the acrid smell in the room and the diagramming of the way the two cauldrons sat side-by-side on the kitchen floor, the environmental factors were not listed. Another terrible oversight, on the part of the healers who had first examined Teddy. Lily was beginning to hate them.

She flipped through _Bloody Bits: A Vampire's Guide to Healthy Eating, _which, surprisingly, had so far been the most informative magical text on blood and blood diseases, praying for the appearance of some page about oddly-coloured blood. Just as the last time she'd looked through it, though, there was nothing. Blood was red and pink, end of.

The clock over the stove, which Lily had rewound when she turned the kitchen into her lair, chimed nine, and Lily knew that if she didn't get back to Hogwarts soon there would be a greater chance of her getting caught. Leaving right then felt almost as if she was giving up. And she wasn't, but she did feel as if she had reached a rather serious dead end.

She sighed, straightened her books, and gripped her wand, shutting her eyes on the hopeless scene before her and opening them on the hills that lined the path leading from Hogsmeade to Hogwarts.

"Merlin fuck."

"Holy—Lily?"

Lily spun around. Hugo and Ris stood frozen in the centre of the path, hands clasped between them, staring wide-eyed at her. "Oh, hello," she managed, feeling the uncomfortable beginnings of a blush behind her ears. "Out for a date? Don't let me keep you. I'll just—"

"We're coming _from _Hogsmeade, not going towards it, so date's over." Ris's tone was snide.

Hugo shifted nearer to Ris and kept his voice quiet, as if he were speaking to an animal liable to spook. "What're you doing? Where are you Apparating from?"

"I was just," Lily began, and then shrugged, "you know, out."

Ris narrowed her eyes. "You've been 'out' a lot lately. You haven't been in Slytherin in ages."

"Yeah, well. Too much to do to hang around there all the time."

"All the time?" Ris repeated. "Fuck, Lil, you don't even _sleep_ there most nights!"

"She doesn't?" Hugo glanced at his girlfriend, then turned to Lily. "Where are you sleeping, Lil?"

"Mostly at tables in the library. Or in classrooms, if the professors are actually patrolling and I don't know the Prefects on duty."

Ris and Hugo seemed to digest this, and then Ris said, "But _why_? It's not like I'm even bothering you or what-the-fuck-ever you think anymore."

"It was never about you," Lily said, suddenly exhausted. "I'm just too busy. Look, you guys go ahead. I didn't mean to interrupt you, and I need to go to Hogsmeade for something, anyway."

"Too busy?" Hugo ignored her request. "You aren't taking any more classes than the rest of us, and most of us still find the time to sleep in our dormitories."

Lily stepped around them and started walking backwards towards Hogsmeade. Hugo and Ris turned to face her. "It's not that I don't still love you both; it's that I can't be what I ought to be. And it's not that I don't trust you," although she didn't really trust anyone, "but I cannot tell you what is going on in my life right now. I _am _sorry." And then she Disapparated, because she knew they wouldn't allow her to get away from them that easily.

She reappeared outside The Three Broomsticks, and pushed the door open, slipping into a table in the corner and putting her head down on the sticky faux-wood top. A few minutes later she stood, got a Butterbeer, and leaned against the bar, sipping the drink and watching the few Sunday evening pub-goers down their drinks in desperate gulps. She set her empty bottle on the bar, ran a hand through her tangled hair, and left—for once, it seemed as if no one had recognised her; Lily had been just another lonely person in a pub on a Sunday, and she hadn't liked it, not at all.

Lily didn't go back to Slytherin that night. Instead she sat beneath her invisibility cloak in the library until early the next morning, and only then did she sneak back to the tower, to shower and change. She had eaten breakfast by the time most students were just rolling out of bed, and returned to the library around the time the sun hit the stained glass windows that ran along one side of the room.

She flipped haphazardly through Potions books, looking for anything that might make sense of Teddy, then she left for class, head empty, and later returned to the library, and still later went to another class, and her life fell into a monotonous chain of coming and going and feeling exhausted.

She didn't get back to Grimmauld Place for a few weeks; her Muggle first aid courses began and getting to London more than once a week became a challenge. Hugo and Ris, and even Bea, had started watching for her, spending more hours in the library than they had in the previous years combined, and she couldn't spend more than the few hours required by the course away from Hogwarts. She owled Connor, promising that soon she'd be able to go to his flat or at least get a meal with him, but every Saturday morning she saw Ris or Bea or Hugo as she left the castle, and knew that if they didn't see her within a few hours they might approach a professor or a cousin or, possibly and terrifyingly, her brothers.

She finally heard, through a very tangled grapevine, that Hugo and Ris were hosting a party in the Slytherin common room on the last Saturday in February, meaning, for Lily's purposes, that she was free to spend the night in London. She owled Connor, asked him if he'd meet her for breakfast on Sunday morning, and packed a night-bag before Apparating to her first aid class.

These classes had been boring and almost overwhelming in the sheer amount of unnecessary memorisation they managed to pack in, but Lily had learned about cardiopulmonary resuscitation and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, practising both on plastic dummies that looked as if they'd been pulled from a rubbish heap.

They were told on the Saturday of the Slytherin party that during their next class they would be learning about what to do when someone was bleeding profusely from a cut, and wouldn't that be _interesting_? The condescension rubbed at Lily's ribs as she packed up her notes and escaped the stuffy secondary school classroom where the courses were held, and she slipped into a bathroom on the same floor, Apparating as soon as she checked to make sure the stalls were empty.

Grimmauld Place felt immense and odd and homelike as Lily walked through the darkness of the main hallway, down to the kitchen, where she dropped her bag on the table and set to systematically ransacking the room.

Nothing. Nothing in the drawers, under the counters, beneath the table legs, nothing but dust in the small closet to the side of the room, where her father told her a house-elf named Kreacher had once lived, nor in the unplugged and dead oven, nor tucked into the rusty tea-kettle or among the few cracked plates that had survived Graham's departure. For the scene of a tragedy, the kitchen looked awfully innocent.

Lily sank to a seat at the table and stared across the room at the vial of Teddy's blood. It wouldn't last forever, she knew, even with the Charms that laced the glass, and she needed to finish this, one way or the other, soon. Teddy himself was failing, Lily saw it, even if no one else admitted to it.

She stood. If photographs and plates and other things belonging to Teddy had been left behind, then maybe other parts of his house, the upper storeys that Lily had never spent time in, still retained pieces of him. She chewed on the inside of her cheek as she began to climb, unwilling to hope, but still feeling something like it unfurling beneath her ribcage.

It took her three tries to find Teddy's bedroom. The first had been completely empty, a light oak hardwood floor and white walls the only sign that it had been touched at all since the days of the Second War. The second had been commandeered as storage, apparently; Lily saw a bicycle at the other end of a sea of rubbish and contemplated sorting through that, later, if Teddy's room turned up as empty as Graham's. But then she took another flight of stairs up another storey, and opened the door to another room. There she found remnants of Teddy.

He had collapsed at age eighteen, only a little older than Lily herself, but where Lily's room at home was a disaster zone, Teddy's at Grimmauld Place was shockingly neat. He had a bookshelf along one wall, spines of books organised by height along each shelf, and a blue rug took up most of the floor, but the dusty edges around it were a light wood. His bed was neatly made, the surface of his desk clear, aside from a few framed photographs of he and Vic and Graham and Lily's parents and a few other friends. His wardrobe was shut, and no shirtsleeves or trouser hems stuck from between the closed doors. It startled Lily, how unexpected Teddy, as he had been when he was awake, was to her.

She took a first hesitant step into the room, feeling as if she was disturbing something sacred, and then rushed forward, kneeling beside the bed, but the space under it was empty of anything, aside from a patina of dust that must have gathered there in the last nine years. Of course, Teddy wouldn't hide anything in as obvious a place as under the bed—that was a rookie teenager mistake.

Lily thought of her own hiding place, of the letter she had tucked between the pages of _Tales of Beedle the Bard_, and turned to Teddy's long bookshelf. She lifted the first book—an old copy of Muggle fairytales—and flipped through it. No paper fell out, so she went to the next.

She was about halfway through the third shelf when an envelope did slide from between a book's pages—Lily glanced at the title and saw that it was _Quidditch Through the Ages: Revised and Expanded Edition_. Lily set down the book and knelt, picking up the envelope with shaking fingers.

The handwriting on the front was familiar, her father's "Lupin" beginning with the same spiky "L" that her name carried when he sent her letters. Lily ran her fingers over the _Teddy Lupin_, fingers moving up the front of the envelope to the small tears the owl's talons had made in the thick paper, back whenever it had carried this letter from her father to her god-brother.

Lily knew that opening the letter would not help her save Teddy. She knew that it was not about his potions-use, that if her father had suspected that he would have confronted him in person. The letter was irrelevant to Lily's life, and to Teddy's current state. But still she lifted the flap from where Teddy had slid it and tugged three pieces of parchment from the envelope. She unfolded them, and bit her lip when she saw the date in the upper right hand corner. Harry had written this on Teddy's seventeenth birthday.

_Dear Teddy,_

_Happy birthday! I am sure you are out celebrating with Vic and Graham and the rest at the moment, and I ought to have had this written to give to you at your party earlier, but it is a difficult thing for me to write, and so I've been putting it off. I hope you'll excuse the lateness._

_This part is not difficult at all: I am so proud of you, Teddy. It has been utterly brilliant, to watch as you've grown into a truly wise and kind and brave young man. I cannot tell you how many times over the years I have had reason to be grateful to have you as my son—for that's what you are to me, as I'm sure you are aware._

_That being said, I am also sure that you feel the absence of your parents increasingly with each year that passes, each astounding moment in your life that you wish they could have been there to witness. I understand these feelings, and the courage it takes to not feel angry at them for missing out on so much—and at times you may feel that anger, and may decide that it is irrational, and it may transmute into anger at yourself, or perhaps anger at Voldemort—at history—and I wish to tell you that when all of those feelings hit you, as your life continues to expand and you continue to grow, you are not wrong for feeling them, for admitting to them. You are honest, brave, and it is good, I think, to confront where you've come from, in all of its shades. Some parents would believed that protecting their son meant they needed to avoid the fighting; yours believed that the only way to protect you—fully, always protect you—was to fight._

_I know that you know all of this, and that you are familiar with your parents, with their quirks and senses of humour and with their stories, but I wanted to write you this letter to tell you a bit about them, as I knew them, so that you have somewhere to go when you are missing them or are angry at them or if you're just looking for some insight into yourself, because I see them in you more and more every day. (And I know my children hate it when people tell them that they are like Ginny or I, so I am qualifying that statement with an admission that, although I see Remus in your loyalty and wisdom and Tonks in your laughter and steadfastness, you are undeniably your own person, with none of the terrible "apple doesn't fall too far from the tree" wisdom implied.)_

_Tonks came to collect me from my aunt and uncle's house when I was fifteen, and she was the most unusual Auror I had ever met. She was funny, where many are, outwardly, at least, serious, she was young, a walking disaster—I swear she broke more things in that house in one evening than I had broken in my entire life, and I was grateful to her for it—and her abilities as a Metamorphmagus made her immediately intriguing to me (I was young, Ted)._

_But Tonks became a stabilising force in my life soon after I met her, at a time when everything, even those I was closest to, seemed terribly shaky. (You know all this, of course.) She broke the considerable ice at so many Order meetings, and she became fast friends with Hermione and Ginny—a rare ability, as both are perceptive and judge well and quickly._

_She loved your father—his initial refusal (out of a noble and ridiculous desire to prevent her from consorting with werewolves) hurt her to such an extent that she lost her Metamorphmagi skills—a sure sign, if any, of how deeply she was connected to him. When Remus finally stopped being an idiot and admitted that he loved Tonks, too, it was as if she came back to life. But even when she was having a hard time of it, she never lost sight of the world as a whole, and the importance of each individual to its continuation._

_Remus was my friend. I can say that now, despite the fact that first he was my teacher (although before that he was a best friend to both my father and godfather) and then he was my mentor. He taught me to conquer fear, and he himself had overcome an extraordinary amount by the time I met him. He was stubborn—as evidenced by his initial refusal of your mother, despite his feelings for her—and astonishingly loyal, intelligent, and brave. I would not have made it through my third year if it had not been for him, and I believe that his kindness helped quite a lot of the terrors that we experienced to turn out all right. Or well enough._

_Together they were calm and happy from the start. I never saw them alone, but they gravitated towards each other at meetings and on missions. They had never been happier than they were when you were born, and their happiness only increased with the bright moments they got to spend with you._

_They were both scared, at times. We all were. They were nervous of raising a child in this world, especially considering your heritage. They were terrified, but they loved you, and so terror didn't matter much, in the face of that._

_I'm sure their dying thoughts were of you, of how brief a time they had with you, of how it broke their hearts, to know that they would not be with you, physically, as you grew. But they are proud of you, Teddy. I know that may seem like small comfort, but they were brave and beautiful people, and they are proud of you._

_As am I._

_Harry_

Lily set the papers down on the floor and wiped at her cheeks. Her hands came away wet with tears. She wanted to reread the letter, and she wanted to replace it in its book, return it to its shelf, and forget it, and she wanted to rewind time so she didn't pick it up. She imagined Teddy, alive, vibrant Teddy, receiving the note at school, reading it in his dormitory with his bed-curtains drawn, crying over the past and the future and the way he was loved, but never in quite the same way as he'd always wanted to be. She wondered whether that sadness ate at him, until he did something undeniably stupid and ended up asleep.

She wanted her father, too, her father as she had seen him when she was seven and he was a hero to everyone, including her. She wanted to tell him, again, that she loved him and was grateful to him and thankful for him—all of that mushy stuff that she rarely felt and never spoke of. But she had seen a bit of his heart in this note, and it hurt her to know how many times it had been broken—his parents, Remus, Tonks, Sirius, and more, of course, more than she could keep straight. And then, when life seemed to have settled for Harry, when he seemed to have been all set up for a happy ending, even if he hadn't had a happy beginning, then Teddy's name had been added to that list, with the qualifier of a heartbeat. A pulse. And that made it worse, somehow.

She folded the letter up, returned it to its envelope, and placed it in the book, which she then replaced on the shelf. But she would not forget it, she knew. And then she drew her knees to her chest and sobbed, alone in a house of history, until she felt a little better.

Her determination to find something useful in Teddy's room had only grown with the discovery of the letter, and so although it was already late she continued going through the books on his shelves—and he had _so many _books—but found nothing. And then she turned to his desk, opened the drawers to find stacks of notebooks organized by size, and pulled out the first pile. The book on top was labelled _Potions_ in a hasty script Lily recognised as Teddy's from eight years of birthday and Christmas notes.

Of course she found it in the place she ought to have looked first. _Of course._

She flipped open the journal and began skimming through the potions. The ingredients were listed out, the process, the expected effect. If it was successful there was a small check mark in the upper right hand corner. All but two—the first and the last—had checkmarks.

Lily perused the first, but it looked as if Teddy had gotten tired of planning it before even getting to the instructions, and so she turned to the last, because what was that if not obvious.

The page was titled "Kaleidoscope," and Lily became more and more convinced that this had caused the coma the more she read. The ingredients he was using—they were, in many cases, banned, and in others they were highly dangerous when mixed with some of the more well-known ingredients in most potions, some of which were on the list. Had Teddy been an idiot, Lily wondered, really, an idiot.

She flipped back to look at the successful potions; surprisingly, many of these looked just as dangerous as the last one.

Perhaps Teddy and Graham knew something about this combination of ingredients that made their effects less poisonous and more hallucinatory—or, less poisonous in most cases. Lily sat on the floor of Teddy's room for hours, reading the final potion over and over. By the time she finally crawled into his bed—past caring about boundaries or disturbing the past—she had the fateful potion memorised.

**A/N:** I promised a few people that Teddy would wake up in this chapter, but it got to be far too long (it's already far too long) so I had to break it up. I'll have the next chapter up tonight, though!


	6. Chapter Five

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Harry Potter__.  
_**A/N: **And once again, there are some things about medicine/biology/phlebotomy in this chapter, and my knowledge in this area is mostly limited to high school biology classes and skimming Wikipedia articles, so I apologize if I made any mistakes. Please let me know if you spot any serious inaccuracies. Thank you so so much for reading!

Chapter Five

Over breakfast the next morning, Lily asked Connor if he had a spare cauldron. "I mean, you must never use yours, right? And I want, well, I sort of need one at Grimmauld Place."

"What do you need it for?" Connor spread jam on his toast but kept his gaze on Lily's.

"I'm—last night I found a recipe book for the potions Teddy and Graham were making and—"

"You're not going to try to recreate the one that put Teddy in a coma, are you?" Connor interrupted. "Because that sounds like a seriously bad idea."

"No, of course not." Lily shook her head. "Merlin. I'm going to try to make an antidote."

"An antidote." Connor took his time chewing and swallowing a bite of toast, and then said, "You realise that you have no idea how far along in his recipe he got on that day? He could have gotten two ingredients in. If you make an antidote for the whole potion, and then give it to him, you run a serious risk of killing him."

"I know that," Lily said, running her fingers through her hair. "I'm not going to make an antidote for the whole potion. I've got this idea, and I suppose it's probably mad, but then this whole thing has been, so. I'm going to try and make a universal antidote."

"A universal antidote," Connor repeated.

"Yes. All of the potions in Teddy's book share some basic properties, and I think if I come up with an antidote to the base, then it will work well enough to reverse the effects of whatever extra bits Teddy got in there. His blood is _purple_, Connor, so I know he got further than the first one or two ingredients—they wouldn't have had any effect on him."

"You still might kill him," Connor pointed out, after a lengthy pause.

"I know. I know that, Connor, but it is either possibly save him with the risk of killing him or allow him to die while knowing that I could possibly have saved him."

"Or," Connor began organising sugar packets in patterns on the table, "you could take what you know to a professional."

"They don't know enough, Connor! There is no one in the world who has the right mix of Muggle and magic knowledge to help him, except for me, and I probably don't really, but at least I'm willing to try. Muggles would be too overwhelmed by the magic bits, and any healers I took this to would refuse to listen to Muggle logic. It doesn't make sense, none at all, but I'm actually it."

"I know you've said that before, I know, but...just, are you sure, Lil?"

"I'm positive," Lily said. "I wouldn't risk all of this for just a guess."

Connor fisted his hands in blond hair, then nodded into them. "All right, you can borrow my cauldron. But it's still hush that I'm helping you, yeah?"

"Obviously." Lily grinned at him, reaching out to grip his wrist in thanks. "You're brilliant, you know."

"Only when you need something."

"Which, lately, is almost always," Lily pointed out. "So."

"Right, so, almost always brilliant. I suppose I'll take it."

"Good man."

:::

Lily returned to school with Teddy's notebook stuffed into her bag, and at night, after her homework was finished, she took it out, smoothed the cover, and began researching the antidotes to the various ingredients in the potions. In the four hours she spent in the library, she made approximately zero progress. By Monday morning, all she knew was that she needed more time than she possibly had, particularly considering that NEWTs were fast approaching.

Lily barely noticed the time slipping by, she spent so much of her life with her eyes glued to the pages of books—textbooks, potions case studies, Teddy's notebook, her own—that there were times when she forgot the outside world existed. By mid-April, she finally had an idea of how to begin her antidote, and she sacrificed herself to Ris, Hugo, and Bea's suspicions and disappeared to Grimmauld Place for an entire weekend.

She Flooed Connor in on Saturday evening, bypassing the Secret-Keeper security with a hastily scribbled note that she'd found in Teddy's room that included the words "Number 12 Grimmauld Place," and as Harry had passed Secret-Keeping onto Teddy along with the house, this meant that Connor, and anyone else who read the note, had full access to the Floo.

"Thank Merlin you're here, I was about going mad," she told him, beckoning him through the entranceway and down into the kitchen. "It's so quiet here."

"Yeah, and also very weird. You realise this place belonged to the Blacks? And then the Order...it's a bloody legend, Potter."

"It's history." Lily shrugged. "But this," she opened the door to the kitchen, led Connor to the edge of his cauldron with the beginnings of her potion bubbling in it, "is potentially miraculous."

"Be a little humble, why don't you." Connor sniffed the air experimentally. "Smells a bit like lilacs."

"I know. I don't think it will once it's finished, though. Probably more like vomit. But at the moment, yeah, it does."

Connor looked around the room. Lily had tacked notes up on all the walls, and where a thought had come too quickly for her to get paper, she'd scribbled it on the walls themselves, so her calculations created a multitextured and multicoloured mosaic throughout the kitchen. Her textbooks were everywhere, jars of ingredients sat in all available spaces, and Teddy's blood still sat in vials along the counters—three, now; Lily had examined a new specimen the night before.

"You're like some sort of mad scientist. _Merlin_." Connor barely attempted to hide his admiration.

"I know." Lily sighed, contented. "It's perfect. Or it will be, so long as it works."

"When do you think it will be ready?" Connor poked at a vial of dandelion blossoms and Lily snatched it from him.

"June, probably. Maybe July. But I'm going to try the potion, unchanged, in Teddy's blood—if it reacts enough to turn it red again, then..." Lily glanced at him. "Connor, love, do you think you'd be willing to inject it into Teddy's arm for me? It'd be just like giving him back his blood!" she said in a rush, because her friend had gone pale.

"No it wouldn't. No, it definitely wouldn't. It would be like killing him. Merlin fuck, Lil, I respect you, but I...no, I couldn't do that. I'm sorry. You'll have to find another way."

Lily nodded, unsurprised. "I think I can make it so he can take it orally, I just was hoping to skip that step. But it should work. I understand." She offered Connor a smile, then turned. "Want to go out to a pub, or were you planning on hanging around watching me try to organise all this?"

"Pub, definitely pub." Connor grabbed her hand and the two left Grimmauld Place; for the first time in months Lily felt more or less a feature in her own life. It was odd that it felt strange to be alive, and she wondered just how far from the world she had allowed herself to drift.

But when she returned to Hogwarts early Monday morning, she didn't try to change anything; she continued in her mildly obsessive researching mania. OWL students and NEWT students had started staying nearly as late in the library as Lily did, and her insanity didn't feel quite so obvious, considering that so many other students were suddenly insane along with her.

Exams came in a rush of stress, and Lily allowed herself to stop paying attention to the Teddy experiment for two whole weeks, at the end of which she finally dropped into a sleep for two days, then rolled out of bed, ravenous, to find Bea packing her trunk and Ris lying on her bed.

"Feels weird, doesn't it?" Ris was saying, and she glanced at Lily once before looking back at Bea.

"So so weird. I can't believe we're leaving." Lily was out the door, but she heard Bea add, "and this is certainly not how I imagined we'd go out. I thought you and me and Lily would leave a trail of pranks behind us that they'd still be uncovering when our kids graduated Hogwarts."

Lily hesitated on the stairs, and then hurried down to the Great Hall, where she paused only to grab some food, before continuing out to the path to Hogsmeade.

The potion was almost ready. It needed only one more ingredient, and then a night to settle, and then Lily could try it in Teddy's blood. She added the small bit of ground gillyweed, then lingered over the cauldron all day, watching as it simmered, finally falling asleep on the table, among her papers and notes and jars of ingredients.

She woke early the next morning, sore and with a glass jar sweaty against her cheek. She slid from the table and stood over the silent cauldron.

Lily bit her lip, dipped an eyedropper beneath the surface, suctioned the potion into it, and turned to the vial of Teddy's blood that she'd prepared the night before. She dropped the potion through the lip of the glass slowly, and waited.

Nothing seemed to happen. Lily's heart stuttered, and then the colour of the blood changed, lightened a little. Lily's hands shook as she cast the Magnification Charm over it.

There, hanging in front of her: perfectly sized, perfectly coloured, perfectly perfect red blood cells. "Merlin fuck," Lily said. "Merlin fuck."

:::

Her father wanted to know about her plans for her life. Her mother wanted to know whether she'd been eating. Her brothers, in letters sent from their respective homes, wanted her to know she'd better have failed a NEWT, because going back to Hogwarts would be immeasurably better than entering, as they said, "the real world."

Lily wanted her parents to leave, so she could visit Teddy with the capsule she'd filled with a derivation of her potion, a powdery version that she had spent all of the last two days she was meant to be at Hogwarts working on. Forty-eight hours straight, and she had it: A single pill, and Teddy would wake up. Or die. She tried very hard not to think about the second possibility.

Finally, finally, her parents left for work, and Lily stepped into Teddy's room. She leaned against the doorway for a few minutes, breathing slowly, trying to steady herself, and then she nearly vaulted across the space between the door and his bed.

She perched on the edge, slid the pill between his lips, across his tongue, massaging his throat so he swallowed reflexively. She waited. Counted his pulse. Waited.

No change, no change, no change, no change, no change, no change, his pulse sped up, and so did Lily's, his pulse slowed, Lily's did not, no change, no change, no change, he stopped breathing.

So did Lily.

For a moment, nothing happened. Teddy had stopped. Lily, despite telling herself all along that death was a possibility, found that inconceivable. Teddy could not just _stop_.

She swung her legs up onto the bed, fast, straddled him. She locked her fingers and pressed her hands down, counting. She leaned in, pressed her lips against his, breathed. She treated him the way she'd treated the dummies in her first aid class, except her movements were desperate.

_Please, please, please, please_, she thought as she moved, kept Teddy's odd blood and his odd heartbeat and his terrible breath going, _please_.

And then there was a strangled noise from his mouth and the breath coming out against her lips was not her breath returned to her, but his own breath, and his own heart was pumping without her hands pushing it along and she flew back, leapt from the bed, as Teddy blinked very, very slowly.

Lily stood on the opposite end of the room, her heart beating faster than—well, faster than believable, surely, and she realised that she had not thought beyond waking Teddy up.

Teddy opened his mouth. A raspy breath fell out. He swallowed, tried again. "Molly?" Lily's mouth went dry. Of course, of course, because Molly had been sixteen the last time Teddy had seen her. Molly had been sixteen with red curly hair. "No, not Molly," Teddy said then, eyes blinking rapidly to clear them of the film of nearly ten years spent sleeping. "Who...?"

"You must be thirsty," Lily rushed. "I'm going to, I'll get you some water, all right?"

Lily's fingers were slippery on her wand as she hurried from the room without waiting for a response. She waved it as soon as she was in the kitchen, her mind stuttering wildly over happy thoughts, and a winged serpent—something like a Chinese Dragon—unfurled, silver and languishing, in the air.

"Go, go, please go, get Victoire and Graham, _please_." Lily managed, breath coming fast. She hadn't thought about this, hadn't had one intelligent thought since she finally brewed the cure. She jerked the faucet so water streamed white into a glass, and then waved her wand and Summoned a straw from somewhere in one of the drawers, scattering outdated receipts and vouchers across the kitchen floor. The glass was wet in her hands as she returned to Teddy, her heart was loud in her ears, her breath still coming too fast.

He was blinking his newly opened eyes, and he turned his head toward her when she came in.

"I'm in Harry's house," he said, "In Lily's bedroom, right? But it doesn't look like Lily's room."

She nodded. "Here." She pressed a hand behind his shoulder-blades, eased him up until he was lying with his back angled against some pillows, and held the glass up to him. "Drink."

"But," he began, his voice still soft, and she shook her head.

"_Drink_. I'll explain everything in a minute. Graham and Vic are coming over." She hoped, she hoped. But not into his room, directly. How would Teddy react, to see his two best mates appear, to see them all grown up? He'd certainly recognise them, the way he hadn't her.

His Adam's apple was bobbing as he swallowed, and she realised, again, just how thin he was. He must have known, she thought, that everything was different, must have felt it in his weakness.

He released the straw and a little drop of water dripped down his chin. Lily reached out and wiped it away with a finger, forgetting how intimate touching people felt when the people were awake to feel it, too. His eyelids fell shut, as if he couldn't keep them open anymore.

"Who?" he repeated, just as two cracks of Apparation sounded down the hall, loud from the den.

"I think that's Vic and Graham. I'm just going to, I'm going to go get them, all right? Stay..." Lily dropped off. She had been about to tell him to stay alive, to stay awake, to stay still, but two of those held too much meaning and the third was redundant, so she left him and burst into the den to find Graham and Victoire talking over each other. They turned to face her.

"Lily, what is it, what's wrong?"

"Is it Teddy?" Graham asked. "What's happened?"

"I—I didn't think," Lily began. Graham and Victoire paled, and Lily thought how that must have sounded, "No, no, I mean, I woke him up."

Graham's breath rushed in an unmistakable gasp, and Victoire's hand flew to her heart, engagement ring catching the light and nails digging into her skin.

"You what?" she asked, as Graham broke away from her and moved toward the hall, toward Teddy.

"Wait," Lily grabbed Graham's arm. "I need—I need to tell him what's happened, before he sees you."

"_We _can tell him what happened," Graham said.

"But he needs to know, before he sees you, he needs—damn, Graham, you're _older_." Lily grabbed Graham's arm. "And so am I, but he hasn't quite worked out who I am yet. So I'll tell him, all right? And that way he can get pissed at me and be glad to see you and we can all be happy and everything will be perfect."

Victoire came up slowly, then, rested her hand on Graham's shoulder. "You woke him up?" She sounded amazed. "Oh, Lily, you perfect, perfect, delightful mess. Please, go tell him, please, so we can see him."

Lily let go of Graham and returned to Teddy. He had his eyes closed still, his breath coming in leaps from his chest. "Teddy?"

He opened his eyes, stared at her. "I think," he said, "that something is very very wrong. But I can't quite wrap my mind around it. Because I think you," his voice sounded weak, although certainly stronger than it had when he first woke up, "are Lily Potter, even though the last time I remember seeing you, you were eight. And you, you are not eight."

Lily nodded. "What is the last thing you remember, Teddy?"

He licked his lips, a quick nervous tic he'd had since he was a child. "I was in the kitchen at Grimmauld Place, working on something. I'd cut my finger, and then I got some—some of what I was working on—in the cut, and I think I passed out?"

"The potion you got in your cut, it got into your bloodstream. It sent you into a coma." Rip the plaster off, right?

"A coma?" Teddy repeated. "For...how long? How old are you, sixteen?" Lily shook her head.

"It's been nearly ten years." He blinked rapidly and then his eyelids shut again, and his breath came in great heaves. If he had had the strength, Lily thought he may have been sobbing.

She crossed the room towards him and pressed a hand against his shoulder—hot, surprisingly so—and said, fingers squeezing, "I can't imagine how you are feeling right now. I don't think I want to. But Graham and Vic are here, and they want to see you—desperately. Can you handle that?"

He didn't say anything, but he nodded, a brief movement of his head, and Lily let go of him and crossed the room. She peeked her head into the hallway, unsurprised to see the two others standing just around the corner from Teddy's room, and waved them in.

"Teddy," Victoire breathed, her voice heavy with tears.

Graham didn't say anything, but his eyes were bright as he crossed the room and grabbed Teddy's hand from where it lay on the bedcovers. Teddy's fingers curled weakly around his friend's hand before Graham let go.

"Merlin, look at you." Teddy spoke in his rough voice. "You both look so, so grown up."

Graham tried to laugh, and Victoire let out a noise like a sob. Teddy blinked, looking desperate.

Lily waved her wand, and two chairs materialised beside the bed. She grabbed the water glass from the bedside table, and said, "I'm going to get you some more water, and then I'll leave you lot alone."

"No, wait," Teddy said, eyes cutting between his friends. "I want to know—how? Why did I wake up when I did, the way I did? Why were you—?"

"Yes," Graham coughed, clearing away years of unshed tears. "Lily, I know we weren't really supportive, in the beginning, but I'd love to know how you did it."

"Oh, now?" Of course now, Lily thought. What better time? "But I should, I should get some water, and then—I mean, Teddy's gran and Dad and everyone should know, too."

"Lily," Victoire said, "give me that glass." She took the glass with her left hand, and Lily noticed that her engagement ring had disappeared. She tapped her wand against it, so it filled with water, and then leaned forward, directing the straw towards Teddy. He sipped, eyes still on Lily. "Now," Victoire said, "as soon as you tell us, you can get Teddy's gran and your dad and the whole world, but _please_. I need to know—Teddy deserves to know—what's kept him asleep for the last ten years."

Lily nodded. "Yes, yeah, of course."

She breathed in, out, in. "All right. So, Teddy, when you collapsed, Graham called medics and healers immediately. They tried all the conventional ways of reviving you, and when those didn't work, they brought you to St. Mungo's." She shut her eyes, trying to remember the important parts of the medical reports she'd spent hours studying over the past year. "And at St. Mungo's they tried a lot of unconventional treatments, too, but nothing worked. You were in stasis."

"And then," Graham picked up the story, because this part he knew, and because Lily was having difficulty breathing, "Harry offered to have you stay with him, because they thought that being with the family might have some sort of effect on your subconscious. And so you moved in and the Potters kept having medics see you—all the best healers in the world—and nobody was able to make any sort of change." He shook his head. "I remember once, one of the healers gave you a potion and your hair changed colour, just for a moment, the barest instant, so fast we all thought afterwards maybe we had imagined it, but—" he broke off, sobs hitting his shoulders.

Victoire continued, "But for that moment, when your hair was green, we all thought that maybe you'd wake up. I've never been so happy in my entire life. And then when you didn't, when your hair went back to brown and weeks passed and you were still asleep, in stasis, like Lily said, we all still clung to that change in colour. We all thought that at least you _could_ change, at least you were still able to. And then, no matter what anyone did..."

"Nothing helped," Graham picked up. "Nothing at all, and Merlin, Teddy, we all—it's terrible, but we all gave up."

"And then, last summer, Lily comes to us, says she's going to try helping you herself."

"And we told her it was impossible." Graham dropped his head into his hands, spoke into his fingers. "_I _told her it was impossible. I demanded that she give up, too."

"But you didn't?" Teddy asked. "Why?"

Lily didn't really answer him. "I didn't think it was possible, either, Graham. But on the off chance, I decided to try. I thought that the healers had missed something big, I thought they must have. So I started taking an anatomy class at Kings College, started living in the Muggle library, reading all their medical texts. I thought it must have been something in the blood."

"How? How did you do all that?" Victoire asked.

"It's not that difficult. Hogwarts is easy to get out of, when you know where to go, and I have a friend at Kings College. It was easy, really."

"The blood, though? Didn't the healers check that?" Graham said, turning so he faced Lily. They were all staring at her. She stood alone in the doorway, hands stuck in her pockets. She felt as if she should have been happy, as if they all should have been happy, and she didn't understand the strange ache in her chest.

"Not in the right way. They're all so—so damnably pretentious. They don't like the way Muggles do things, and so they miss things Muggles would see. That's what I eventually figured out, after reading all the materials on Teddy." Lily bit her lip. "I'm sorry if I invaded your privacy, but it was the only way I could figure out how to save you."

Teddy laughed. "Don't apologise to me. Besides, I've heard the dead and dying have no privacy."

Victoire hissed, and Graham snapped, "You weren't _dying_."

Lily nodded. "He actually was, though. That's what I worked out from monitoring him this last year. His rate of decline, your rate of decline," she readdressed Teddy, feeling so strange to speak to him, knowing he could hear her, "it was increasing. I'm sorry, if you don't want to hear that," Lily told the others, "I am, but it's true. I finally managed to get some of your blood," Vic's eyes shut and Graham's hands fisted on the back of the chair, but Lily kept on, "this year, and when I looked at it, I realised that it had turned purple—which isn't at all a natural colour. There were a few other deficiencies, too, and I knew it must have had to do with the potion you were making at the time. None of the papers on you had reported what was in that potion," Graham flushed, and Lily knew her guess had been correct—he had Vanished it, a move he had probably thought would save his arse and Teddy's, "but I, and I am sorry, Teddy, but it's the only thing I could do, I found your notebook in your room at Grimmauld Place, and I figured out what potion you had been working on. I created an antidote, and I finally finished it last week. Gave it to you today, and the reason you woke up with me on top of you," Victoire turned red and Teddy grunted, a sound like he'd been hit in the stomach, or like he was trying to laugh, but hadn't quite worked out the muscles involved yet, "is because you stopped breathing when I gave you the potion. I used a Muggle reviving technique on you, and so that's why. And then you woke up and I realised I had no idea what to tell you, so I panicked a bit, and got Graham and Vic here, and that's it, that's all."

"He died?" Graham asked.

"Not really. His body just went into shock." Lily almost added, "or something," but they were all looking at her as if she had grown another head, a monstrous one, so she bit her lip.

"Well," Teddy said, "well. Thank you."

"I couldn't not," Lily told him. "And now I'm going to go tell my dad and get a healer over here to check on Teddy. Dad can tell everyone else and he," Lily told Graham and Vic, who were still staring at her, "can punish me for being irresponsible, so you don't need to worry about that."

"It's not that you were irresponsible," Graham said.

"It's just..." Victoire shook her head. "It's amazing, Lily."

"Truly incredible," Graham smiled at her, glanced at Teddy, whose eyes had fallen shut again. "Absolutely unbelievable that he's awake again."

"Oy, I'm right here," Teddy said, struggling to open his eyes.

"And still himself," Victoire gripped his hand. "Still himself."


	7. Chapter Six

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Harry Potter_.  
**A/N:** There are little bits of medical chat in here, but I think mostly we can excuse away Teddy's recovery time by using magical remedies. Again, if you do find anything seriously ridiculous, medicine-wise, let me know! Thank you for reading!

Chapter Six

Lily left them in silence. Her hand was shaking as she dropped a glittering fistful of Floo Powder into the fire and her voice was unsteady as she asked her dad to please come home as soon as possible. And as she pulled her head from the fireplace, stepping back in anticipation of her father falling from it, she heard laughter from Teddy's room, and she breathed a bit easier.

Harry spun out a moment later, brushing ashes from his robes. "Lily, what's the matter?"

"I," she began, and then another laugh drifted down the hall, this one weak and soft and a bit wild with newness, and Harry's eyes widened.

"Teddy?" he asked.

"He's awake," Lily said, and before she could explain at all, Harry was out of the den.

Lily followed slowly, and by the time she got to Teddy's door Harry was kneeling beside the bed, holding his godson in a tight hug. Graham and Victoire had moved back a few feet, allowing Harry room. Everything was silent for a few moments, and when Harry released Teddy, carefully allowing him to fall back against the pillows Lily had placed there earlier, both men had tears in their eyes. Harry turned to look at the other three.

"How?" he managed.

Vic and Graham glanced at Lily. She straightened her back. "I worked out an antidote."

"You?" Harry began, stopped, stared. "Lil, you what?"

She reworded it. "I figured out a cure."

And then Harry had her in a hug that nearly strangled her, for just a few seconds, before he stepped back with his hands still on her shoulders and said, "How?"

She swallowed. "They've already heard it. Let's go into the den. We should probably call his healer. Can I just tell you both at once?"

"And Gran? And Ginny?" Teddy added from the bed.

"Yes, and them too?" Lily asked. Harry nodded, gave his godson one last look, and led Lily from the room.

The others came quickly, as soon as Harry sent off his Patronus, and Lily stood in the centre of the den, while the others sat around her, and told her story again. Slower this time, with more explanations of her thought processes, and fewer insults directed towards magical medics.

The healer, an older man named Digsby, still interrupted her frequently. "You got some of his _blood_? How?"

"A syringe, a needle."

"How did you learn to do that?"

"In my Muggle classes," Lily lied, knowing no one knew enough about Muggle lessons to be able to call her on it. Her father still narrowed his eyes at her, and her mum's lips thinned, but they didn't say anything.

"But that's dangerous," Digsby said.

"No one else was going to do it," Lily pointed out, before continuing, detailing her analysis of the blood and her discovery of the potion.

When she had finished, explaining about mouth to mouth resuscitation and CPR for the medic, Teddy's gran stood and hugged her, a long, soft hug that left Lily feeling awful and vulnerable. "Thank you, my dear, for being so brave."

Lily bit the inside of her cheek to stop herself from responding, from explaining that saving Teddy had been driven by nothing more than a selfish cowardice.

"I'm going to go sit with my grandson now, if you don't mind," Andromeda said to Lily's parents. "And you," she said to Digsby, "need to come and check on him, and tell us what to do to make sure he recovers entirely." She winked at Lily as she led the medic from the room, and Lily turned to face her parents.

They sat on the couch, both staring at her. Ginny opened her mouth a few times. Harry didn't move. Lily had no idea what to say.

Finally, Ginny said, "You promised you would stay at school this year. No sneaking off, no breaking the rules, and now you're telling us that you were in London at least once a week, sometimes more."

Lily nodded.

"Why didn't you tell us what you were thinking, Lily?" Harry sounded more exasperated than she'd ever heard him.

"You wouldn't have thought I could do it." Harry and Ginny exchanged a glance and Lily hurried, "Not because you've ever been less than supportive, but—I didn't even think I could do it, a lot of the time. But I knew I had to try."

Her parents shook their heads, a quick synchronized movement. Lily felt tense. "I want to ground you for eternity and give you everything you've ever asked for at once," Ginny said. "You worked a miracle, Lily, and I don't want to punish you for that."

"Sometimes doing the right thing requires a lot of wrong things along the way," Harry said. "Merlin knows your mother and I are aware of that."

"However," Ginny continued, "you could have killed him. You very nearly did. And that would have messed up everyone's lives, yours more than anyone else's. You understand that?"

Lily wanted to say, "But I didn't," wanted to point out that Teddy was more alive than he'd been in nearly ten years. She didn't, though. She bit her now raw lower-lip and waited.

"So," Harry said, "we are going to punish you."

"But," Ginny cut in, "I don't think you will mind overly much."

"What?" Lily asked.

"We want you to look after Teddy. The healer will obviously check in, and we'll need to get him a physical therapist, but you'll be there to look after all of his needs. Every one. And when Vic or Graham need help, so they can visit him, you'll help out then, too. We'll give you a bit of a stipend for it, so you won't need to get another job straight off. All right?"

"Of course." But she wasn't so sure. Teddy had been easy, in his silence. But how would this newly awoken Teddy fit into Lily's very narrow existence?

:::

The first week was, to put it mildly, agonising. Vic and Graham and Teddy's gran were around constantly, and Lily felt like an interloper, coming in at odd hours to force soup and water down Teddy's throat, to remind him to do arm and abdominal exercises—legs were too much—and, if Digsby hadn't stopped by, to ensure that he was passing urine. Mortifying would have been an understatement.

It was worse because of the constant presence of the others; Lily could tell that Teddy was as uncomfortable as she was, and neither of them was going to loosen up under the constant—if nonjudgmental—gaze of Teddy's two best friends and his grandmother. And at night, when they weren't there, Lily's parents sat with Teddy. She found herself thinking almost longingly of the long nights she had spent alone with him—with him asleep, and her talking herself there.

But that was an awful thought, because that Teddy had been dying, and this Teddy, this awkward man, was alive.

But her conversations with him consisted entirely of questions and answer sessions about his health, and Lily's mind was crumbling under the very repetitive process of keeping Teddy physically well, or well enough. And she worried, that first week, worried about how he was doing mentally—the shock of the whole ordeal couldn't have settled in yet, but he didn't seem to be having problems adjusting. He was taking it all much too calmly, in Lily's opinion, and she cornered Graham and Victoire as they were about to leave on the Wednesday evening a week after Teddy had woken up.

They were standing beside the fireplace, Floo Powder already in their hands, and Lily slid in against the mantelpiece, blocking their access to the grate. "Do you guys think he's okay?"

Vic and Graham glanced at each other, and then over their shoulders towards the hallway. Graham spoke softly, "Is there some reason you think he's not?"

"The fact that he hasn't had a breakdown yet is a little worrisome, to me. I mean, Merlin, ten years and he accepts it?"

"You _want_ him to get angry?"

"Yeah, yeah, I really want him to get angry. Or sad. Or something—show some emotion. I want it very badly."

Victoire sighed. "You didn't know Teddy very well, back before, but he never really showed emotion. It just wasn't his way."

"Okay," Lily drew the word out. "All right, I'm sure that's true. But for something this big? He's got to be feeling crazy—why isn't he showing any of that? And," she continued, before Graham or Vic could excuse Teddy's calmness as a personality quirk, "this is none of my business, really, but I need to know, so I don't slip up sometime—when are you going to tell him you're engaged?"

The two exchanged looks. "Soon," Graham explained, "it just seemed best not to blindside him with too many things at once."

"But now you think he's adjusted? Or as much as he's going to anyway. Don't you think it'll be more difficult, the longer you wait?"

"Well, yeah, but...fuck," Victoire said. "It's terrible, Lil, how strange this is. He's still eighteen, you know? In his head? And no matter what I say, I can't wrap my mind around that, around him being eighteen. But he is—and so, for him, in his head, we're still together. Even though rationally he seems to understand that we're not. But I know we need to tell him. I do. It's just very, very hard."

"How do we even bring it up?" Graham asked, taking a fistful of his hair in the hand not holding Floo Powder. "_Hey, Teddy, this is a bit tough, but Vic and I are engaged_? How do we do that, without hurting him?"

"I think that's exactly how you're going to need to do it. It's going to hurt him, but it would hurt a lot more to find out from someone else, or to find out later."

"What, you want us to do it now? Right before we leave?"

Lily stepped away from the fireplace. "Of course not. I'm just saying you should do it soon. For you, if not for him."

Graham and Vic exchanged a glance. "We know you're right. We do," Graham said, as Vic scattered her Floo Powder in the flames. "And we will tell him. Tomorrow," he promised, before he followed Vic into the fire.

Lily turned away. She didn't know what to do, really. She didn't know how to deal with Teddy, with this odd triangular friendship she'd somehow gotten caught in the centre of. She wanted to help all of them, but nothing that she was doing seemed to help at all. She thought it might have been true that she was only making things worse.

Her parents went to a function that night, the first time they'd left the house at night since Teddy had woken up, and Lily knocked on his door only ten minutes after they'd left. It would be her first chance to be truly alone with Teddy, and she felt nervous, terribly so.

"Come in." Teddy's voice had gotten stronger over the past week and a half, but at night it still sounded tired, like it wasn't used to being used.

"Hey." Lily stepped into the room, but lingered by the door. "Do you—do you mind if I sit in here for a while?"

Teddy raised his eyebrows, but all he said was, "No, of course not, it's fine."

Lily perched on the edge of the chair that Teddy's gran had left by his bed and looked around the room for a moment. Not much had changed—he had just gotten to sit up in bed the day before, completely on his own, and the healer said that this was excellent progress, but in Lily's head Teddy's recovery ought to have been instantaneous.

Because he was still bedridden, he hadn't had the chance to change a thing about the room, and so Lily asked, "Do you want me to do anything to this room? Dad did all this when they first moved you in here, so you wouldn't wake up to find unicorns all over the walls or whatever, but—do you like it?"

Teddy snorted. "It's fine. Much better than it was when you were little—no offence. There are more pictures around than I'd have put up, I guess, but," he sighed, "I guess those were probably more for the people who were visiting me than they were for me." Lily nodded. Teddy looked up at her, and then turned his head so he could see the pictures on the bedside table. "People _did_ visit me, didn't they?"

"Are you mad? Of course they did!" Lily drew her knees up to her chest and rested her chin on them. "Merlin, when I was little there was always a crowd in here. And then, as time moved on and everyone started losing hope, you still had people coming at least once a week to see you—your gran was in here every weeknight and Graham and Vic came most days and my parents and brothers were always around." Lily tilted her head. "And then there was me, too—anytime the others weren't around and I was home, I was in here, trying to sort out what had happened." And, before she'd decided to help him, feeling sorry for herself beside her comatose god-brother had been a bit of a habit. And, before that there had been people everywhere, hoping for a miracle. She wasn't about to admit to that, though. "So, yes, Teddy, you were very popular—you _are _very loved."

"I'm sorry," he shut his eyes, "I know that sounded a bit—needy, or whatever. It's just so hard to imagine what it was like here, living through the last ten years. I really can't picture it. I feel like I just dropped off to sleep, like no time passed at all."

Lily reached, unthinking, for his wrist, the reassuring familiarity of his strengthening pulse beneath her hand. He opened his eyes in surprise, and she let go, rushing to fill the silence, "Don't you dare apologise. You are allowed to feel angry or confused or lost. You are allowed to ask all the awkward questions. You are allowed, because you've missed out on ten years, and the fact that you have woken up doesn't change how much that sucks. Please, Ted, feel free to ask whatever questions you want to—you can say whatever you want."

He stared at her. "You're the first person to say that. I guess the others may be thinking it. But I asked Vic a question today—just a stupid question about what had happened to her friend Tiana—and she turned so pale. Like reminding her that I haven't been around these last ten years is a sin, or something. I don't want to hurt anyone more than I already have."

Tiana had slept with Graham just before he and Vic had gotten together—her friendship with Vic had been pushed beyond resolution by that point—and Lily imagined that hearing Teddy mention Tiana had reminded Vic of the secret she and Graham were keeping from him. To Teddy, of course, it was just another innocent topic that he was, evidently, not allowed to mention. "Well, it'll take time for everyone to adjust—you too, of course. But like I said, you can say whatever you want to me. I won't be offended."

He lay back to stare at the ceiling. "Why?" he finally asked.

"Why?" Lily repeated.

"Why you?" Teddy bit out, his tone explosive beneath the words. "Why do you seem to care—you didn't even _know_ me."

Lily could feel the words she'd spoken in the empty air of his bedroom the year before, the confession-like force of, "I've done some stupid shit." Instead of repeating her selfish, karmic-based reasoning, however, she just shrugged and said, "My parents love you, my brothers worship you, I thought I might never have the chance to know you, and that seemed unfair, especially after I realised what had maybe caused the coma."

Teddy shut his eyes, and when he opened them again he looked at Lily and said, "Sometimes I am so grateful to you and other times I want to yell at you and ask you to—demand that you—put me back to sleep."

Lily remembered the feeling of him dying under her fingertips and the way that had hurt. But she also remembered that there had been the slightest frisson of relief in her chest, beneath the pain and fear the stopping of his heart had caused. So she nodded. "Yeah."

"Yeah? You don't think that's sick?"

"Fuck, no." He flinched at the expletive. Lily needed him to shake any memories of her eight year-old self that still clung in his mind. She was not that girl, and he needed to know, so she repeated it with increased vehemence, "_Fuck_, no. You're speaking rationally for the first time since you've woken up. This must be so difficult for you. So difficult. And you weren't even aware you were asleep—I'm sure that felt nice. After all, who doesn't wish for oblivion, sometimes? And when you're having to do what you're doing—of course you'd be pissed at me. I'm not going to apologise, though. I hope someday you'll be more grateful than angry."

He blinked at her in silence for several minutes, and then he said, softly, "I hope I will, too."

Teddy drifted to sleep soon after, and Lily left his room hopeful that their conversation had broken through the awkwardness between them.

The next morning, however, when she came in to give him his breakfast, he seemed even more reticent than he had before the previous night. He barely even mumbled, "Thank you," for the porridge she fed him, even though she knew that it had the perfect amount of brown sugar in it from the way his hair flushed scarlet when he tasted it.

But Lily had told him he could say whatever he wanted to her, and she supposed that included saying nothing. Soon after breakfast his physical therapist arrived, a middle aged wizard named Ryan. He was carrying some new strengthening potions that he wanted to try out, and he and Lily discussed the general merits of the various potions over Teddy's head as he began stretching his arms the way the physical therapist had instructed him to. And then, when the therapist left, Victoire and Graham arrived, and Lily left the three to themselves.

She had expected the kitchen to be empty when she returned with the breakfast dishes, as her parents had already left for work, but the chairs at the table were pulled out Ris and Hugo and Bea sat around it, talking in soft voices. They stopped when Lily froze in the doorway.

"So." Ris crossed her arms.

"You cured Teddy?" Hugo stood.

"And that's what you were doing all this year?" Bea asked, following him.

Lily nodded, leaned against the doorjamb.

"Why didn't you tell any of us?" Ris pushed away from the table and moved to stand beside Hugo. "After we started trying to talk to you again—why didn't you tell us?"

"I didn't think you'd believe I could do it." Lily's patented excuse for this question had served her fairly well so far; she didn't see any need to change it.

Apparently it did not work for them, though. Ris and Bea shook their heads and Hugo said, "Bullshit."

"Is it?"

"Yeah, yeah, it is. We've never acted as if you couldn't do something, Potter. Not ever." Bea kept her stare fastened on Lily's eyes. "Even when we weren't speaking to you, we never _doubted_ you."

Lily couldn't think back beyond the not-speaking time, because the time before made her feel an ache somewhere around her heart, but she knew that the three of them at least believed what Bea was saying, so it didn't much matter whether Lily herself did—they wouldn't accept that as her reasoning for not letting them in on her attempt to cure Teddy.

"Maybe. Maybe I also wanted to prove that I could do something—this one thing—by myself. I mean, I ended up needing a little help, but it was—curing Teddy—it was something that I thought I really _needed _to do." Lily looked down at her feet, bare in the watery summer sun falling through the window behind her friends. "It was, it was sort of like atonement?"

"Atonement for..." Hugo trailed off.

"For fall of sixth year?" Ris sounded disbelieving. "Fuck, you really go all out, Potter. In case you hadn't noticed, we were ready to forgive you when you hadn't done a thing to _atone_ for it."

"Yeah, I noticed. But did you notice that I hadn't quite forgiven myself? Still haven't, to be honest."

"Merlin fuck, Lily, let it go." Bea crossed the space between them and set her hands on Lily's shoulders. Lily tried not to flinch as the other girl's gaze accosted hers. "Let. It. Go. You were so stupid but we all were back then—it's dumb to pretend you were the only one making power plays. Yours were just a bit more destructive than ours, that's all." Bea released her, and stepped back a bit, giving Lily some space—she had always been liable to explode when her boundaries were threatened.

But Lily felt no urge to explode. She felt awful and honest, and so she said, "But how do I—how do I fit right back into the group again? After all this time, after all—everything?"

"I guess," Hugo said, "I guess it won't be immediate. But we can try, right, and it might go slowly but at least it'll be something?"

Ris squealed, leapt forward and threw herself on Lily. "You are an utter _bitch_ and I hate you." But she was holding Lily so tightly that she could barely breathe, and so the words didn't mean anything aside from Ris saying, "I missed you."

"So," Hugo said, when Ris had released her, "are you coming out to lunch with us?"

Lily glanced over her shoulder, down the hall towards Teddy's room. "I'm meant to be looking after Teddy—that's my punishment for this whole thing, although obviously it's not a very bad punishment at all—but Vic and Graham should be here for a while. I'll check with them."

Graham and Vic and even Teddy had urged her to go take some time with her friends, and Vic had given her an odd look when she'd asked, as if she was proud of her, which made Lily feel uncomfortable, so she had fled without really checking to be sure that Teddy had enough water in the glass on his bedside table, of if he'd taken the strengthening potion Ryan had left for him. All through lunch, Lily tried to pay attention to what the others were saying, talking about some odd sort of drama that had separated the Gryffindors from the Ravenclaws at the end of term, which Lily had missed out on entirely, of course, but every time Lily's mind brushed the conversation something reminded her of another thing she may have forgotten and she felt a fierce need to be back in Teddy's bedroom.

When they parted outside the café Hugo paused before Disapparating and looked at Lily. "You all right?" he asked, his voice soft enough that Ris and Bea, who were discussing the relative merits of maxi dresses, did not hear him.

"Yeah, yeah, just worrying about Teddy."

Hugo gripped her shoulder. "I'm really proud of you, Lily. I didn't tell you that before. But I am. What you did for Teddy—it's really...it's really amazing."

Lily shrugged his hand off. "It was mostly common sense. And he's not really out of the woods yet."

"Which is why you're worried about him?"

Lily nodded. It was partly why. She was also worried that he would never be happy to be awake, which was, she knew, probably ridiculous. But people's minds got stuck sometimes, and if Teddy's did she'd never forgive herself.

"Well, better get back, then." Hugo stepped away. "We'll see you this weekend? We can all go to the Leaky or something?"

"Sure." Lily reached out for a quick hug, and waved at Bea and Ris, and then Disapparated, arriving in her empty living room moments later.

Soft voices came from Teddy's room, and Lily assumed that meant everything was fine. Still, she tapped against the partially open door and asked, "Need anything?" Vic glanced at her, smiled in a tense way, and shook her head. Teddy didn't even look at her, and Graham was staring at his hands, which were clasped between his knees.

That had looked as if Vic and Graham had decided to approach the difficult topic of their impending marriage. Lily felt as if her stomach had been squeezed—she hoped that pushing them to tell Teddy had not been a mistake. She thought of the way he had looked last night, of how he had said, "and other times I want to ask you to—demand that you—put me back to sleep," and she hoped that this didn't push him over a precarious edge.

Vic and Graham didn't leave until late that evening, and they came up to Lily's room before they used the Floo.

'How'd it go?" Lily asked, glancing up from the novel she'd been reading.

"Fine, I think. He sort of went quiet at first, and then everything seemed normal." Graham had one hand on his neck, as if he was trying to hold himself together.

"He said congratulations." Vic had her ring back on her finger, but her eyes were a bit wider than usual, making her look particularly ephemeral and a little shocked.

"Wow." Lily didn't quite know how she had expected Teddy to react, but for some reason calm acceptance hadn't been it. Although, she thought, as she stood to follow the others down the stairs, that's how he'd dealt with everything else, in front of everyone else. She wondered what she'd find when she brought him his dinner and nightly dose of potions.

"Yeah. So he's all right," Vic agreed from a few steps below Lily. "You'll be around tomorrow, right?"

"Of course." Lily left them by the fireplace and the Floo Powder and ducked into the kitchen. Her parents weren't home yet—she thought she remembered them saying something about getting dinner with Ron and Hermione—and so she began preparing a small dinner for herself and Teddy.

Teddy didn't respond when she knocked at his door, and she opened it slowly. "All decent?"

He didn't say anything, but he was sitting up in bed, his covers kicked off. He wore only boxer shorts and a t-shirt and his legs looked thin and fragile. He was staring at them, at his white knees and shins and thighs on his white sheets.

Lily thought that either Victoire and Graham were blind or that Teddy was a fantastic liar, better than all of Slytherin put together, for them to have thought that he was all right. She set the bowl of soup and plate of bread down on his desk, beside the various vials of potions that he had been subsisting on since he woke up—since she woke him up—and watched him watching his legs.

"This morning Ryan told me I'll be able to walk again. He said I'll be able to start trying soon." He sounded sad about this, and Lily tried to work her mind through all the loops in this miraculous news, tried to figure out why Teddy wasn't ecstatic. Nothing made sense to her, so she waited. "But," Teddy touched the top of his right thigh with his fingertips. He shivered. "But what will I be walking _towards_?"

Oh. Lily hopped up on the edge of the desk and drew her knees to her chin. She looked at Teddy. He looked at his legs, at his long, narrow, momentarily useless feet.

"Can you not say anything for a while?" he asked. "I mean, can I just talk. Can you not respond? Just for a little while. I just need—."

"Yeah, of course," she said, then rolled her lips together and waited. He needed her to be to him what he had been to her for the last several years, and she would willingly repay that debt until she died.

He still didn't look up. "When I stop thinking _about_ all this, when I just _think_, I forget that I'm ten years older than the last time I remember—really remember anything—and in my head I am working in a pub and I am, I am dating Vic, and I'm thinking about marrying her someday, and I'm thinking about eventually getting into the Ministry for a steadier job, but that's all in the future, in my head, because in my head I am eighteen and I have time. There is no rush."

Lily waited several heartbeats.

"And then I remember—hey, I'm actually almost twenty-nine and I have to learn to fucking walk again, and then maybe I can get a job in the Ministry and I can settle down—to what, though? Because Vic and Graham are getting married, apparently," he jerked his head up to pin her with a glare, "which you _knew _about, which _everyone_ knew about, and they're just telling me now. And on the one hand I get it, I get they couldn't tell me straight off. But on the other—it's all pretty damn unfair. And then I tell myself that _I _am being unfair because I was the one who fucked up, who messed everyone's lives up by messing around with potions and going into a fucking coma, and I should be happy that Graham and Vic got together—should be happy that they've been able to somehow get over what I did. But in my head I am only eighteen and all this just makes me want to hit things."

Not speaking was proving to be more difficult than Lily had expected. She wanted to comfort him somehow, but the bit on her lip so hard she felt the skin split and waited.

"And then there's you." He was looking at his feet again, his toes. "I still don't get it and I don't get why you're here listening to me and I do not understand who you are at all, because the Lily Potter in my head is eight years old and wild and you are not her, of course, because you're eighteen years old and you are so hard to figure out. And you have seen more of me than is bearable and I should be mortified, but you were here all throughout—through the last ten years, through everything, when I wasn't—and it makes me think, sometimes, it makes me think that maybe you know me better than I know myself. And all of this put together is so terrifying, you have no idea, no one has any idea, and my best friend is marrying my ex-girlfriend and I am meant to be happy about it, but," he had tears in his eyes, Lily could make out the way they were nearly spilling over from where she sat, "I never had the chance to stop loving her."

Lily didn't hesitate before sliding from the desk and moving to sit on the edge of Teddy's bed. She reached for his hand and pulled his head into her shoulder, and he stiffened for only a moment before letting go and crying against her t-shirt. She squeezed his hand so tightly it must have hurt, but he didn't pull away. She still didn't say anything; she didn't think he needed her to.


	8. Chapter Seven

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Harry Potter_. Also, as a warning: This chapter (and the next) include brief conversations which brush upon the topic of suicide/assisted suicide. They don't take up a lot of the plot by any means, but I know that's a sensitive subject.  
**  
**

Chapter Seven

He inched away from her fairly soon after he stopped crying, and Lily Summoned a box of tissues from the desk and handed them to him. She ruffled his hair as she stood from the bed, the melancholy blue strands slipping through her fingers—he hadn't quite gotten control of his Metamorphmagus skills yet.

"Thanks," he said, after he had blown his nose and dropped a few tissues into the rubbish bin by his bed.

Lily nodded.

"You can talk now." He smiled in a small way and she returned it, but didn't say anything as she sorted Teddy's potions and replaced the tissue box on his bedside table.

"Lily?" He hesitated. "I didn't mean to—"

"Stop." She turned. "Merlin, you're ridiculous. I _told _you, didn't I, not to apologise to me. I promised you you could say anything and everything to me, and you can. I just don't think there's much _I_ can say right now. Not much of worth, anyway. Anything I say will sound stupid and cliché. So let's just focus on you walking again. Everything might not be good, especially not right away, but it will be different, and I hope to hell that different will be better."

He blinked at her through tired grey eyes. "What happened to _you_, Lily?"

"What do you mean?" She poured a little bit of a violet liquid into a glass and added a few drops of calming solution, mixing them with a plastic coffee stirrer. The scent from the glass was sharp and strong, and she could feel her own pulse slow as she brought it to Teddy. He took it from her with one steady hand.

"What I said, about you not being eight anymore—that was only part of it. You're obviously not eight, but you're also not how I imagined you as a teenager. I sort of thought you'd be a younger version of James—but you're obviously much more serious than him, even more than Albus."

Lily shook her head. "It's just that you only see me when there's something serious happening. Like, you healing. That's serious, so I am too."

"You're trying to convince yourself of that." He sipped from the potion and made a face, lips twisted in against his teeth. Lily let out a small laugh and he continued, "But you forget that the last time I remember seeing you you were sitting with Hugo and Roxy in the garden, having a picnic with bread and butter and a jar of olives, and you had these black olives on all your tiny fingers and you were crying because you were laughing so hard. Roxy kept trying to lean in and snatch the olives with her teeth, but you held your hands over your head and wouldn't let her get at them. And that is, of course, you being a child, but it is also you not caring about anything. If I rewound you, as you are now, I doubt I would see that in your childhood."

Lily knew what had happened, of course. Teddy was what had happened, and then the intrigues of Slytherin House, but Teddy had paved the path to Slytherin for her. His silence had. She couldn't tell him that, of course. "I don't know, Teddy. People change. I guess I did, too. Finish your potion."

He rolled his eyes at her, but he swallowed the potion in a few gulps and handed the glass back to her. "This isn't finished, you know," he said, but the words ran together as the potion led him to sleep.

:::

Teddy was quiet the next morning as Ryan instructed him in therapy. They got him sitting up at the edge of his bed, his skinny legs bent and his feet placed on the wood floor. They'd softened the floor with a Charm so it wouldn't hurt his bare feet, which hadn't touched anything aside from the fabric of his bed sheets in nearly a decade. Ryan told him to just move his feet against the floor, without lifting himself from the bed, and seemed pleased when Teddy was able to. Teddy, though, said barely a word the whole time.

As soon as Ryan left Lily returned to Teddy's room and asked, "What's the matter?" hoping he understood the implied, "aside from the obvious."

He looked at his hands. He lifted them, held them out in front of him, and then he looked at Lily. His eyes were black and her heart stuttered for a few uncertain beats; he didn't look like the man she knew.

"I—" he began, but then a bird flew into his closed window with a sound like the bass from a Muggle pop song and the whoosh from the Floo whipped through Teddy's open door.

"Hey." Graham and Victoire appeared in the doorway a moment later, as Lily undid the latch on the window and pushed it open, leaning out to see the bird—a barn owl she recognised as Connor's owl Quentin—straightening its feathers on the grass outside.

"Come on," Lily reached her arm out the window and the bird flapped up and alighted there. She turned to see that Graham and Victoire had sat in their usual chairs, and that the three of them were watching her. Teddy's eyes were grey again.

"It's for me," she said, feeling a tight nervousness in her gut. She hadn't spoken to Connor since before Teddy had woken up. She had sent him a note, though, a single line reading, _It worked_. "Did you want anything before I leave you guys?"

"We're good," Graham answered, and Teddy nodded agreement.

"You sure, Ted?" Lily asked, hesitating by the doorway.

"Yeah, yeah, thanks." He looked away from her, to Graham, and Lily slipped from the room not at all reassured.

She fed Quentin some owl biscuits in the kitchen, and petted his ruffled head while slitting the seal on Connor's envelope.

_Lily_,

_What kind of bullshit message was that? "It worked"? That is all I get, after I've been helping you all this time? Are you out of your mind? I want details! _How_ did it work? How is Teddy? Are your parents mad at you? Has Victoire left Graham for him? Has Graham left Victoire for him? WHAT IS GOING ON?_

_You need to keep me more informed. Come out with me this weekend._

Lily set the note on fire without really thinking about it, dropping the paper in the sink so the ashes sizzled black against the stainless steel. Quentin hooted, shaking her hand from his head, and hopped over to stare at the smoking pile.

"Sorry, Quentin, I didn't mean to worry you. Here." Lily pulled a piece of parchment from a stack by the window and wrote a response to Connor. _Sorry, it's been mad here, as I'm sure you can imagine. I'd love to go out with you, but I'm not sure if Saturday will work. I'll let you know! And then I'll tell you everything, I swear._

She handed the note to the owl, who gripped it in his beak and fluttered from the open kitchen window.

"Lil?" Victoire spoke from the hall, her voice shaking a little. "Can you come here?"

Lily pushed away from the counter and hurried toward Teddy's room. Victoire and Graham stood by the door, and Teddy was lying in his bed, hands fisted in his comforter. His lips were white-lined and his eyes were that spiralling black again. Lily felt like falling.

"What's wrong?" she asked Teddy. To her, at that moment, he was the only one who mattered. Victoire and Graham needed to be bigger in all of this.

"Nothing," sounding the way Lily did all that year when Ris and Bea and Hugo approached her.

"He wants us to stop visiting," Victoire explained, tears threatening at the edges of her words.

Graham shook his head as Teddy elaborated, "I just need a little while—a month or something—without seeing you both."

Lily winced. He could have worded that better. "But tell him, Lily," Graham pleaded. "Tell him that seeing us is good for his recovery. It is, isn't it?" His voice was like a push down her spine, a shove—but in what he would have considered the wrong direction.

"Not if he thinks he needs time away from you. You should give it to him—however much time he needs, you should give it to him."

"Bullshit." Victoire's voice snapped.

"Time is too important." Graham sounded small. "And we've already lost so much of it."

Lily glanced at Teddy. He was looking at his hands again.

"Can you come out here?" Lily nodded towards the hallway.

Victoire shook her head, and Graham said, "But this is about Teddy, we can't just leave him out of it."

"Fine, but he's already made his choice," Lily pointed out. "You're just prolonging the process. He needs time to adjust. That's hard to do when he's getting barely any time to himself."

"But we can't just leave." Victoire had taken Graham's hand, and Lily saw Teddy's eyes flicker shut behind them.

"You can," she said it softly, "You can, because you love him and you want him to be happy again."

"But..." Victoire began, and Graham squeezed her hand—Lily saw the tightening of his muscles, saw the reflexive tightening of Teddy's hands on his duvet.

"Will you send us a note every night, Lil? Just letting us know he's all right?"

Lily looked through the space between their shoulders to see Teddy nodding. She thought he would have agreed to writing the notes himself, if it had gotten them out of there. "Of course," was all she said. "Of course I will."

"Thank you." Graham glanced over his shoulder at Teddy. "We'll see you, Ted," and, keeping Victoire close to him, her hand still closed in his, he left the room.

Teddy let out a breath of air that sounded as if he'd been holding it since Victoire and Graham had arrived.

"Want some tea?" Lily offered, unsure of where she stood in this odd situation.

Teddy shook his head. "No." He breathed in and out, eyes still closed, and Lily heard the fire in the living room start up, heard Graham and Victoire's soft voices disappear under the rush of flames. Teddy finally sighed. "Thank you."

"Anytime. I'm your guard dog."

He tried to smile, but it broke on its way to the corners of his lips, so his mouth did this odd twisting thing and his eyes squeezed shut. "I hate myself," he managed, through this snarled mouth. "But I need, I really need, to get over her."

Lily crossed the room and sat on the edge of his bed. "No one else hates you. I said that you're allowed to feel whatever, and you are, but I don't _want_ you to feel this way. Do you hate yourself for making other people feel bad?"

He nodded, eyes still shut.

"I get that. Merlin, I get it. And I'm sure it doesn't help to hear that nobody blames you. You probably want everyone to blame you. Why is everyone else always the bigger person, why are you always the selfish one? That's how I felt about it, feel about it, whatever." Teddy wasn't saying anything. His breath was light, Lily could feel it against her cheek, she was sitting that close to him. She reached for his hands again; they released the covers to link with her fingers.

"So here we go," Lily inhaled. "I am angry at you for being an idiot and brewing illegal potions. Most especially, I am angry at you for not taking care of that damn cut when you got it. I'm upset that you didn't think. I'm also upset that you were not in perfect health when I woke you up _and _that you are not happy now." Teddy's grip on her hands was so tight she thought he might break something. "However, I care more about you than I do about all of that anger and that is how I am able to sit here and tell you that I do not want you to hate yourself."

"But you don't even know me."

"We've been over this. Besides, I'm starting to. And," Lily leaned in closer to him, "I spent a lot of time with you these last couple of years. I sort of vented to you. And I know you didn't have a choice in the matter, but you helped me a lot. So," she pulled back, speaking at a normal level, "I understand that you hate yourself, but I think you shouldn't. Now, would you like to play a game of Exploding Snap with me, or should I leave you alone for a bit?"

"Fuck, you remind me of my grandmother." Teddy sighed, slid his hands from hers, and then started laughing into them. "I'm sorry," he said, when he was finally able to breathe again. "Merlin, that's probably the most insulting thing I can say to someone. Wow."

"I know your gran," Lily pointed out. "It's actually sort of nice. So long as you don't think I look like her." She hopped down from the bed and tugged open one of the drawers of the desk, searching for the deck of cards James had kept there.

Teddy was staring at her when she turned back around, cards in her hand. "No," he said, "no you don't look like her."

"Well, we're sorted then. Your deal?"

Teddy slowly scooted further towards the wall, and Lily sat cross-legged on his bed. He took the cards and began shuffling.

Later that night, Lily sent Graham and Victoire a message reading: _Everything's fine. Sorry for the drama today, but I bet it'll help in the long run. (Which will hopefully not be that long.)_

Neither Graham nor Victoire responded, but Lily's owl came back quickly.

:::

The absence of Teddy's usual visitors meant that Lily felt as if she needed to spend more time with Teddy than she had before, a possibly incorrect thought, but one that stuck with her regardless. She wrote Connor a letter about what had happened since Teddy woke up while sitting beside him. He was reading an old novel of James's and laughing to himself occasionally. Lily kept looking up, thinking he may have been reading her note, but he didn't seem interested in it. She sent it off to Connor, promising to let him know the instant she was free to go out.

Bea and Ris and Hugo came to visit, and they and Lily sat on the floor of Teddy's room eating lunch. Teddy listened to their conversation without saying much. After they left Lily came back in with a book and some potions, he asked, "What happened between you and Hugo?"

"What do you mean?" She set her book on the chair by the head of Teddy's bed and set the potions in a row on his desk, tapping the top of the first one with her wand so it warmed a little.

"I mean you didn't act that naturally around all of them, but especially around Hugo."

"Oh." Lily leaned forward to check the level of the potion she was pouring into Teddy's medicine cup. "We had a falling out a couple of years ago, and we're only just now resolving it."

"But what was the falling out about?"

"Sorry." Lily turned to face Teddy and saw that his eyes were on her. "I keep forgetting—I told you about it when it happened, but I guess that doesn't count now. I made up some lies about Ris and Hugo and a few about Bea, too, and they figured out that I was the one starting the rumours and confronted me. Do you want the sleeping potion or do you want to try sleeping without it?"

"Wait." Teddy held up a hand. "Why would you do that? Lie about your friends?"

Lily sighed. "You didn't use to judge me," she muttered, attempting unsuccessfully to soften the words with a smile. "I wanted to be the one in control. I thought if they didn't trust anybody else—not even each other—then I'd be the most important person in each of their lives. I don't know. Luckily for me and everyone else it backfired." She held out the sleeping potion. "Yes or no?"

"But I still don't get it. You don't—"

"Look," Lily interrupted. "It was two years ago and I was stupid. I guess I had an inferiority complex or something. I'd really rather not rehash it. Now, would you prefer to take your sleeping potion or not?"

"One more night," he said, as he'd been saying for the past week.

Lily poured the sleeping potion into the mixture and handed him the glass. He took it and said, "Sorry."

She shook her head. "No apologies, remember?"

He downed the glass in one gulp and handed it back to her. "Let me know if you ever want to talk about—it. I promise I won't judge."

Lily sat on the chair by his bed and opened her book. "Easier said than done, but thanks."

:::

Albus came home four weekends after Teddy's revival; he burst into Teddy's room while Lily was cutting his hair, blue-turned-brown strands floating in the air as the door flew open.

"Teddy! Merlin fuck!" Albus threw himself at his god-brother and Lily just managed to get out of the way of a half-wrestling hug.

Albus pulled away with strands of Teddy's hair stuck to his jeans and his t-shirt. "Merlin, I didn't believe it, but I couldn't get away from work until just this weekend and oh my fuck, Teddy, I can't believe it."

"Imagine how I'm feeling. Last time I saw you you were shorter than Lily. And now you're an adult with a job that keeps you away from home on weekends." Teddy threw a glance at Lily, and she waved her wand and cleared away the hair from the bed and the floor and Al. "Much more dignified. Thanks, Lil."

"Thought it might help." Usually when he was feeling panicked Lily took Teddy's hands, the way she had the first night he broke down in front of her, but Albus was in her way and besides, she didn't like the way her brother was looking between the two of them.

"Fuck, Teddy. How are you feeling?" Albus sat down in Lily's usual chair and Lily drifted to the door. She could hear her parents in the living room and she figured they could use help getting Al's room set up for his surprise visit home.

"My healer says I'm doing well," Teddy said, with the air of someone announcing their impending doom. "Lily, wait."

Lily turned in the doorway. Al glanced over his shoulder at her, his eyes bright green and curious. Teddy was pleading with her silently, his eyebrows drawn in over his nose, asking her to stay.

"Oh, I forgot." Lily crossed the room and poured a small tumbler of Teddy's calming solution. The way his eyes looked, he could do with some, even if it was not strictly in his medical regimen for the day.

She handed him the glass and then perched on the end of his bed as he sipped it. "So, Al, how is work going?" she prompted.

"Good. We've got this mad dragon on the reserve right now, pretty sure it's a cross between a Hungarian Horntail and a Chinese Fireball, and _Merlin_, the number of times we've all almost died."

"Where'd you get him?" Teddy asked, his blanketed feet pressing almost imperceptibly against Lily's thigh.

"Someone brought in an egg—claimed he found it in a crevice in the Highlands. Beyond me, really. For all we know he bred it himself and then realised he knew fuck all about raising dragons. We take everything, no questions asked. If it breathes fire, it's ours."

"Any new burns?" Lily asked, leaning forward.

"A few. This thing is a beast, like I said." Al tugged up his left sleeve to show them a shiny red ropy burn snaking around his wrist and winding up to his elbow.

"That's actually pretty badass."

"Cheers." Al tugged his sleeve down. "Don't either of you tell Mum or Dad, though. They're already worried about me enough as it is."

"We're worried about what?" Harry asked from the doorway, and Al jumped. Teddy chuckled as Lily stood and ruffled Albus's hair on her way to her father.

"Al was just saying they've got a darling new dragon in. He didn't want you to know because it's a bit of a monster, but aren't they all, really?"

"That's it?" Harry glanced from Teddy to the back of Albus's head. His neck was thankfully pale, although Lily knew from the look on Teddy's face that Albus's cheeks were flushed red.

"That, and that he's the one assigned to tending it." Lily's voice carried undercurrents of the glee she used to feel when she was little and telling on her brothers. Harry sighed.

"Albus, your mother and I want to know what you're up to. You are working with dragons; we do realise that's dangerous."

"Sure, Dad." Al didn't turn around.

"In other news, will you both come help your mother with dinner? We're going to be eating in here with Teddy, so I need to set up the room."

"Sure." Lily waved at Teddy and Albus followed her a few seconds later, once he'd gotten his blushing under control.

"You'd be a much better liar if your face didn't change colour so easily," Lily told him as they pulled plates and cutlery from the cabinets.

"Yeah, well, you'd be a much worse liar if you hadn't had to cover for me and my blushing so frequently, so, really, I don't see why you're complaining."

"I'm not complaining, just remarking."

Ginny came in then, pulled a casserole dish out of the oven, and disappeared down the hall again. Albus reached for Lily's wrist as she was pulling some knives from the drawer.

"I never told you...I'm really impressed and amazed with what you did for Teddy."

"Thanks, Al." Lily smiled at him and he nodded and let go. Ginny reappeared in the doorway.

"Lil, can you go get your desk chair? The dining room chairs won't fit around the table your dad's setting up in Ted's room, but I think yours is small enough."

"Sure." Lily set the knives down on the pile of plates Al had placed on the counter.

"I'll get it," Al said. "I need to go up and drop my bag in my room, anyway."

"All right." Lily gathered the place settings and carried them to Teddy's room, where her dad was lengthening the end table so it would fit four chairs around it. She set the plates and cutlery down and helped her mum carry out the rest of the food, and still Albus hadn't reappeared with her desk chair.

She made it to the top of the first flight of stairs before she found him. He was halfway down the flight leading to her attic bedroom, and he stopped when he saw her at the top of the lower stairs. He held a piece of parchment in his hand, and it—his hand, the parchment, all of him—was shaking.

"Al? What's that?" But Lily thought she knew what it was. The envelope she'd managed to keep out of sight on Christmas, which she'd tugged from the ages of _Tales of Beedle the Bard_, tossed on her desk and then forgotten about.

"It was addressed to me, so I thought—well, why not read it?"

"Because I hadn't _given _it to you, maybe." Lily was afraid, suddenly. Albus's voice was loud, too loud for the quiet of the house. "Al—"

"No." He glanced behind her, eyes narrowing. Lily looked over her shoulder and saw that her parents were crowding at the base of the stairs, looking up at them. From this angle they looked absurd—short and shadowed.

"What's wrong?" Harry asked.

Albus shook his head, lifted the shaking letter up, and began reading. Lily felt her heart stutter.

"For Albus, in the event that I am not well."

"I kept meaning to throw it away," Lily interrupted, more for her parents' benefit than Al's. He'd already read it, and he was livid.

"Albus," Ginny began, but Al spoke over her, reading.

"Teddy's just been left downstairs and everyone's talking around the problem and speaking softly like he's just sleeping but everyone is so sad, so sad, and so I think he won't be waking up again. So I guess he's not just sleeping. But he's still alive, and it's awful, the way he's hanging on. I think it's sadder than death. I think being alive like that would be worse than be dead, to be honest, and honesty is what you're getting from me now, because if you're reading this then you've gone to _Beedle the Bard_ for comfort or something and I am like Teddy, or worse. I know it's a lot to ask but if I am like Teddy, or worse, would you please find a way to kill me? I'd rather be dead than be like that.

"Thanks very much and I'm sorry to use you but you understand, don't you? Love you."

Albus's voice sounded the most incredulous on the "love you," as if he couldn't quite believe those words, given that the rest was true.

"I told you," Lily said, "I meant to throw it away," her voice sounding weak to even her.

"You wrote this," Albus's voice was shaking, "sorry, you wrote _this_ when you were eight? You wanted me to kill you, me, Lily, you wanted me to kill you when you were eight?"

Lily heard footsteps on the stairs and her father's hands settled on her shoulders, gripping them so tight she thought he meant to keep her there, on that step, forever. Her mother was behind him, she could feel their closeness without turning around.

She inhaled a shaky breath. "I wouldn't ask you to do it now. I guess I was just scared, of Teddy, and what had happened, and what it meant. I never—I mean, when I was little I wasn't thinking about how horrible that letter would sound—whether I was dying or not—and so I wrote it and forgot about it, mostly."

"I was ten, Lily. Why on earth would you have—I couldn't have—I would never have." Albus was breathing hard, his hands fisting the letter into a crumpled mess.

"Albus," Lily said, voice breaking. "I never ever would have had you read that, honestly."

"Except you wrote it, and I assume you meant it." His voice came out ragged.

"I was eight!" Lily burst, shaking beneath her father's grip. Her parents still hadn't said anything, and their silent presence worried her more than Al's palpable anger. "Please, please, this cannot become a big deal. This was ten years ago. Do you even—ten _years_! Ten years ago, you could have sat me down, tried to tell me why you kept Teddy lying there, ostensibly alive, really, I thought then, so very dead, but now—" Lily shook her head. "Albus," she said, "Albus, Albus, Al. I'm so _sorry_," her voice caught on a dry sob, "so sorry that I never got rid of that letter. I just never thought about it. I really didn't."

"But you," he said, like he'd done earlier, "you wanted me to _kill_ you, Lily. Don't you see how selfish that is?"

"As selfish as keeping me alive when I didn't want to be?" Lily asked, her voice clogged.

A sound shook the house. It was a small sound, a slippery one. Something heavy hitting the ground. Lily whirled out of her father's grip and pushed past her mother. She leapt over the final four stairs and didn't stop at the bottom, barely breathing as she flew to Teddy's room.

He sat on the floor, his long tired legs straight in front of him, his hands pressed palms-down into the floorboards as he tried to lift himself up. He succeeded in hovering there, but even as he bent his legs Lily knew he wasn't going to stand. Even with a walker he hadn't managed more than three shuffling steps in the time since they woke him up.

"Teddy," Lily breathed.

"Don't." He looked at her, and then at her family, who had come in and fanned behind her.

"Let me help—" Albus stepped past Lily.

"_Don't_." Teddy relaxed his arms and lowered himself to sit completely on the floor. He covered his face with his hands. Lily thought if he lowered them and opened his eyes they would be black, pupils and irises—his colour for self-loathing.

"Teddy," she repeated. "Please."

He shook his head.

"I'm—"

"No apologies," he ground out, his voice sounding much more serious than hers ever had when she told him the same thing. "That's what you're always saying, right? But, damn, I should always be the one who's apologising." And then he opened his eyes, and they were black, and glazed with tears. "I _asked _you," he said. Lily heard her mother inhale, heard her father's soft, sad sigh. "I asked you what happened to you. And you said you grew up."

"I _did_."

"You did," he agreed. "You did, but you grew up with your comatose god-brother in your bedroom. That's what did it, isn't it? You were thinking about dying at eight, Lily. You wrote that note and two weeks before you were playing with olives. Look, just. Just _don't_, please."

Lily started forward, but a sudden pressure hit her. She stared through the thickening air at Teddy. He hadn't been able to use magic since the coma, not anything beyond his Metamorphmagus skills, and now he was using it to keep her out. To keep her away.

"Look, Ted. Let me help you." Albus moved through the space as if it was normal air. He lifted Teddy back to his bed and when Lily stepped back, across the terrible emptiness of Teddy's room, she felt the air loosen around her. He was letting her leave him. She wondered if he meant for this distance to last.


	9. Chapter Eight

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Harry Potter_. Also, as a warning: This chapter includes brief conversations which brush upon the topic of suicide/assisted suicide.  
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Chapter Eight

Lily's parents led her to the kitchen. Her father pulled out a chair, nodded her toward it. She sat, closed her shaking hands between her knees.

Albus came through, heading toward the stairs looking a little red around the nose. Ginny held out her hand, palm out. Lily felt the combined magic of her family shiver in the air, tense and static.

"Albus, wait. We're not done with you." Ginny tilted her head toward the chair beside Lily. Albus slumped in it, hiding his face in his hands.

Harry and Ginny exchanged a look and evidently decided that Ginny was in charge of this discussion, because she began, "What made you read that letter so loudly, Al? Why didn't you confront Lily about it in private? Or you could have brought it to us."

Albus didn't say anything.

Harry continued, "Because we understand—Merlin, do we—that it upset you. It upsets me and your mother, as well. But making it so public, especially considering how it involves Teddy—that was unconscionable."

"I wasn't thinking," Al spoke into his wrists, voice muffled, "especially not about Teddy."

"Okay," Harry leaned back against the counter, crossing his arms. "That's not exactly an excuse, but you were obviously surprised."

Albus nodded and moved to push away from the table but Ginny said, "No, you're staying. This is our family. It involves you as much as it does Lily. And," she glanced at the doorway, her eyes sad, "Teddy."

"Lil," Harry turned to her, "will you please explain your eight year-old-self to us?"

Lily pressed her fingernails into her palm and counted to fifteen. Then she said, "I was very confused about how Teddy could be alive but seem so dead. I didn't understand how people were mourning him—or weren't mourning him, depending—and I hated the way people kept flocking to his side, like their presence made a difference. I didn't think I would like that—being half-dead, having other people see me like that, have you all mourn me while I was still sort of alive—I thought that was terrible. I thought it would have been better to die." She inhaled a shaky breath. "I thought it would have been better for Teddy if he had died."

Harry shut his eyes. Ginny stared at her. Lily refused to look at Al, but she noticed that he stopped breathing for a moment. "But you must have gotten that much from the letter. It's all I was thinking, when I wrote it. How sad we all were, and how a sudden quick sadness would be better than a prolonged one."

"But to hear you say it, so confidently," Ginny trailed off.

"Here is my problem." Al sounded angry still. "You thinking that when you were eight is sad and understandable. You writing that letter is a little bit crazy, but still reasonable—you were young. But you found it on Christmas, I guess, when I made you get the _Tales of Beedle the Bard_?" Lily nodded. "And you kept it? Why didn't you just throw it out?"

"I meant to," Lily said, as she had before he'd read it.

"But you didn't. So here is my question, here is why I am so bloody upset with you: Would you still prefer that? If something happened to you now, would you expect that letter you wrote a decade ago to still stand? Would you still want me to kill you?"

Lily knew the correct answer. She knew she could lie convincingly enough to get it past her parents, but not Al. Never Al, who had once told her she lied like a Hufflepuff—he was the only one who knew her well enough to see through it all.

She could feel her parents staring at her. She imagined Teddy, lying in his bed, hating himself and not letting her near him. She thought of ten long years, and how the world changed, and how it felt to be lost. "I would want to die." She looked at Al. "I would. But I wouldn't want you to kill me—that was selfish."

He squeezed his eyes shut. "You're—Lily, you're mad."

"But Teddy woke up," Harry said, sounding shattered. Lily didn't look away from Al. "You woke him up. So if something similar happened to you, why wouldn't you have hope? Why wouldn't you let us have hope?"

"This is dumb," Lily snapped, finally, her insides feeling cold, icy like they had that day she fought with Hugo in the middle of the Great Hall. "We're dealing in hypotheticals. Supposing this happened, supposing that didn't—there's no way to know. All I know is that sleeping for ten years is not a life I would choose for myself—all I know is that I would choose death. And I'm sorry if that is selfish too. But it doesn't matter, because this isn't happening."

"But, Lily."

"But nothing," Ginny cut in. She crossed the room and dropped a hand to Lily's shoulder. It felt warm, breaking through Lily's fragile coldness. "She's right. Sort of. You, Lily, have always seen things differently than the rest of us. And thinking about these, spinning out these scenarios, it's utter bullshit. It's like looking backwards, wondering what would have happened if Teddy had gotten a job at the Ministry straight after Hogwarts. And if we go there, we might as well go all the way back, rewrite everything that's happened in our whole lives." Harry was looking over Lily's head, and his gaze was softer, less heartbroken, than it had been when he looked at Lily. "And you know, Harry, how addicting and how devastating that can be. What happened happened, what hasn't happened hasn't, and if there is any sort of luck in this world, Lily will never be in a situation where she would rather be dead. Thinking about it now isn't going to do any good." Ginny leaned down and kissed the top of Lily's head. "I'm sorry."

Harry looked at them, and then crossed the kitchen and knelt beside Lily's chair, on the other side from Al, who still hadn't said anything. "Please come to us first, Lily. Before you ever do anything drastic, please remember to trust us."

Lily nodded and pressed her face into her father's shoulder for a moment, remembering how that used to comfort her. That night it made her feel closed-in, nervous, but it calmed him down. She pulled away and Harry rocked to his feet. "I'm going to go talk to Teddy."

Ginny nodded, brushed her hand from Lily's head to Albus's, and said, "I'm going to bed. We'll see you both in the morning."

And then Lily and her silent brother were alone in the kitchen. Albus looked at her with hard green eyes, and then dug in the pocket of his jeans and held out a flesh coloured string. An Extendable Ear, by way of apology. Lily gripped the bud between the two of them, and they leaned close as the other end crept down the hall.

"I am so sorry," Teddy was saying. "For what I've done to your family."

Harry let out a dry laugh. "There are so many things wrong with that statement, I barely know where to begin. First, you are a part of my family, if you'll have us. We're a bit dysfunctional, but we're nice, and we chose you a long time ago. As you know, Teddy, you _know _this. And second, nothing that has happened was your fault. Aside from your stupidity in dealing with brewing illegal potions—and I believe you have learned your lesson there—you have not done a thing."

"But—" Teddy protested, "But Lily."

"But Lily nothing. Lily is fine. She is a good kid. She has always been different from her brothers, different from me and her mother, but that is not a bad thing. She is not...I don't know what you're thinking, Teddy, but she isn't _broken_. She's just Lily. And there is nothing wrong with her. Not a thing."

"But she's..."

Albus's head had gotten closer to Lily's, and she glanced at him as Teddy trailed off. His eyes were right near hers, curious and seeing too much.

"Not eight anymore. I know she's told you this, Teddy. Maybe you being in our house did affect her. But it didn't ruin her, or whatever you are thinking. Lily is the only person responsible for who she is today, and I happen to think that she has grown into a very good person, and perhaps I'm biased, but I honestly think that you _blaming _yourself for who my daughter has grown into is the dumbest thing you have done since waking up."

"I wasn't saying that, not really," Teddy said after a long pause.

"No, but you weren't not saying it, either." Harry sighed, the sound whispering up through the Extendable Ear. "Teddy, we love you. Your life isn't what you expected, but there's no reason to spend your time regretting that, feeling bad about it—you're never going to be okay again, if you keep that up." Lily and Albus glanced at each other. Al's face was twisted in guilt, and Lily nudged him.

"It's all right," she whispered. "I'm sorry too."

"And if you want the truth," Harry's voice prevented Al from responding, "as I'm sure you do, I think that you have helped Lily more in the last few years, and especially in the last few months, than anyone else has done. It may be a bit morbid, a little sad, that you helped her when you were asleep, but you did, Teddy, and you're helping her even more now. So please don't block her out. I know she needs you, and I'm fairly certain you need her, as well."

"What does that mean, though, needing someone?" Teddy sounded small. Lily felt a flush inching up her neck, and she was glad that Albus wasn't looking at her.

Harry said, sad. "Oh, Teddy. It just means you're friends. It just means you trust each other. That's all, although I guess that's everything. It's a good thing, to need someone. It's like your dad and Sirius or me and Ron and Hermione or you and Graham and Victoire, when you were all at Hogwarts."

"But not now," Teddy sounded like he was mourning something. "Not me and Graham and Victoire, now."

"They want that back, Ted. But do you?"

"I don't know. Is it okay, to not know?"

"Of course it is."

Then the sound of Harry moving, stacking plates and cutlery from the table, came through the Extendable Ear and Albus tugged it so it snapped back to them. He handed it to Lily, ruffled her hair, and said, "We're okay, too, aren't we?"

Lily nodded and he continued up the stairs, and she stuffed the Ear in her pocket, staring at the tabletop for a few minutes, until Harry came back into the kitchen Levitating all of the dinner preparations in front of him. Lily stood to help him put everything back where it belonged, and Harry said, "Give him a few days, Lil, and I think everything will be back to normal. He's just dealing with—well, you know."

Lily nodded. "I know."

Harry said goodnight, warned her not to stay up too late, and moved up the stairs. Lily waited a few minutes, and then tiptoed up the stairs behind him. She knelt near the top, hesitated for just a moment, and then released the Extendable Ear towards her parents' room. She fit the bud in her own ear just as Harry was saying, "Do you think that Teddy will ever forgive Graham and Victoire for moving on, and Lily for not?"

"Do you think he hasn't?" Ginny sounded tired, but not as if Harry had woken her up when he came in.

"I get that impression, yeah. He's trying so hard, I've never seen anyone try so hard, but yeah, I don't think he's forgiven them."

"Might need to forgive himself, first?"

"Probably." Harry spoke softer, as if aware of the way sound carried in their house. "It's just that sometimes I see Remus in him—so much of Remus—and he was a great man, but he allowed his past to affect his present and future to such an incredible extent...I am terrified that Teddy will do the same."

"We'll just need to work on him, Harry. He's young. He still has time."

"But I worry he's not young enough."

Lily jerked the Ear back toward her as Harry's shadow moved across the strip of light at the bottom of his door, and she slipped up to her own bedroom after waiting a tense minute.

She thought that when her mother had said, "We'll just need to work on him," she had really meant that Lily would need to. Teddy was her responsibility, her friend. Even if it did take him a few days to admit it.

:::

Lily lingered outside of Teddy's room for two days, but she still felt the pressure of his magic, so she didn't try to go inside. His healer and his physical therapist came and went, they told her he was doing fine, but she felt devastatingly outside of his life.

The sixth day, she Flooed Connor in the evening and begged him to go out with her. She was going mad with no one to talk to but her parents, especially now that Albus had returned to Scotland, and she thought that Connor would understand what had happened—would understand her—better than the others. Besides, there was always the chance that he wouldn't want to talk.

Lily Apparated to London to meet Connor in a pub. It was low-end enough that he had been able to order a drink for her, and they settled into their pints directly.

Lily told Connor about what had been happening since Teddy woke up, and then she told him about the letter and how Teddy had shut her out after. He listened quietly, only occasionally nodding his head. He interrupted to ask about how Al had responded to the letter, and he looked concerned when she said, "Not well, but he's over it," and he sighed when she finished, a long, hopsy sigh that left Lily feeling a little sad.

"So Teddy isn't speaking to you?" He pressed his palms against his eyes. "This is going to sound whiny and I'm aware of that, but have you noticed what a terrible friendship of convenience we have here? You only ever call me when you're bored or lonely, Lily." And then he laughed. "Or if you need me to draw blood out of your fucking half-dead god-brother."

Lily blinked and drew back a little. "Connor," she began, unsure of what she was going to say next.

"Stop for a moment," he said in the heavy pause following his name, "I know you can talk your way out of anything. You can make me love you again just by apologising, with no explanation whatsoever. But I need you to know, Lily, that it hurts like hell when you remind me that I am last on your list, or whatever. And I never feel like you give a damn about me."

"Of course I give a damn about you." Lily reached across the table and grabbed his hand, clung to it. "I give a fuck-tonne of damns about you. Merlin, I don't know where I would be right now if it weren't for you. And not just because Teddy needed you." He raised his eyebrows. "Because I needed you. And not because I needed _someone_, and you were there, but because I needed _you_. I'm sorry I don't act like it, sometimes. Or ever. But I do, Connor. Fuck, I had no idea. I'm sorry."

"And there you go, it's all forgiven." Connor snorted. "You're dangerous, Lily Potter. The most dangerous girl I know. Let's just have a good time tonight, all right?"

"All right. And I swear I won't mention Teddy or Ris or Bea or Hugo again."

He laughed. "We'll see if we have anything to talk about, then." But he was still smiling, so Lily just smiled back.

Later that night, Connor tripped on the pavement, and Lily caught him, her hands slipping on his t-shirt, and he steadied himself with his forehead to her shoulder, his laugh warm against the stretch of her collarbone. She could feel the looseness of the alcohol in her, and she leaned her head against the side of his, waiting for him to steady.

"Lily?" he asked, pulling her closer.

"Connor?"

He pulled his face away from her, and then angled it a bit, leaned in, kissed her sloppily. She returned the kiss, feeling the mess and the possible end of their friendship in every movement of their lips and tongues, and not caring, much.

She pulled away, finally, her breathing sharp and fast. "Connor," she said. "What are we doing?"

"Having fun," he promised. "That's it."

She leaned in and kissed him quickly, then stepped back and stuck her hand in her pocket, searching for her wand.

"I need to go home," she told him. "I really badly do."

He laughed. "'You really badly do?' What even is that?"

"It's proper." She found her wand and tugged it out. "I'll see you soon, okay?"

"Don't freak out, Potter," he told her, as she Disapparated, and for some reason those words sounded crueller than any of the others he'd said all night.

She Apparated straight into her bedroom, and crawled into bed with her wand, casting a half-drunken spell to keep a Beatles song looping endless from her walls. She fell asleep like that, curled up in her tank top and skinny jeans, while "Blackbird" played softly and she still tasted of alcohol.

She dreamt that she was being suffocated, that someone held her, kissed her with beer-tainted lips, held her nose closed with a sticky hand; she dreamt that she couldn't breathe through the kiss and the hand and the softness of her pillows behind her.

She woke up gasping, air hurting as it rushed through her lips. She rolled and screamed into her pillow, a fragmented noise drawn straight from the nightmare.

Normally she would have gone to tell Teddy about all of this, but Teddy was conscious and not speaking to her, not even seeing her, so she couldn't. And even if he had been speaking to her, if there wasn't that ring of magical pressure around his bedroom, she didn't know if she'd have been able to tell him about this. And what was this, anyway? Just a kiss, a single kiss. A nothing, really.

What would she have said, if Teddy were still asleep?

She practised it on her ceiling: "I went out with my friend Connor tonight and we drank beers and whisky and he kissed me, and I kissed him back, and I don't think it was the alcohol really. I think it was real for him and for me it was loneliness, I'm pretty sure, just years and years of loneliness. And now I'm having nightmares about it, nightmares where I can't breathe because I feel bad and guilty because Connor might want something more—Connor always takes me so seriously—and I don't want him but I want someone but I don't want to fuck everything up again."

Asleep Teddy would have stayed still, comforting and sad in his sameness, and she would have felt better just for getting it out. Her ceiling stayed the same, but it lacked the angle of Teddy's nose and the paleness of his skin and the general comforting sound of his breathing.

Lily didn't know how awake Teddy would have responded. He probably would have told her not to lead Connor on. Probably, but who knows. Maybe he would have asked her if she liked Connor _enough_, whatever enough meant. Maybe he would have stayed silent and still, like his sleeping self, because the thought of eight year-old Lily kissing boys broke his brain.

She probably shouldn't have kissed Connor. Admitting that, even just to herself, led to a feeling of shame growing along with the odd taste of stale beer and the itchy feeling of city smells settled on her skin. She rolled out of bed and crept down the stairs, to the bathroom she shared with her brothers when they were all in the house. She took a shower, scrubbed at her skin until it was red, and brushed her teeth until her gums bled. She dressed in an old t-shirt of Albus's that he had left in the bathroom ages ago, and left the room along with a wash of steam, feeling a little better. Cleaner, anyway.

As she was about to return to her bedroom, she heard a strange sound like torn sobs from downstairs. She made it to the kitchen and then she hesitated; Teddy didn't want her near him, but he was alone, and waking up alone from a nightmare—that was a sad thing, a feeling that ached.

So Lily hesitated by the kitchen table, but then she continued, into the hall and to the air that had pressurized around her for the last several days; that night it felt normal, though, clear air that she had no trouble walking through. She interpreted that as an invitation and pushed the door all the way open.

Teddy was in his bed, of course, hands fisted in his sheets, breaths coming in rasps. Lily moved forward, pressed one soft hand against his shoulder. "Ted," she murmured. "Hey. Teddy."

His eyes shot open and they were grey, normal grey, but they didn't focus on her for the longest moment; they were vague and indecipherable. His breathing didn't slow and Lily thought he might not have been awake at all, and then his hand released his sheets and grabbed her wrist, his fingers searched for her pulse-point, and she felt an odd feeling of dislocation. Teddy was counting her heartbeats; she'd always been the one to count his.

"I remember things sometimes," he said, voice unsteady, "from being asleep. They're like nightmares or dreams. Only some things. Only sometimes. It's making all this a bit more real."

He still had his fingers on the pattern of her heart. "What do you remember?" She tried not to move. She tried to calm her pulse.

"It's all vague. But my gran, sobbing over me. Victoire and Graham fighting—they fought a lot in the early years, didn't they?—and then their breathing, with no noise at all. And I remember your touch, you touching me like this. And I have this bare memory, this outline, of your voice."

"What was I saying?" Lily had said a lot of shit to Teddy over the years. There was a good chance he was remembering something unsavoury.

He sighed. His fingers pressed down a bit harder. "I only started remembering after Al found that stupid letter, and then everything started coming—it was because of that letter, because it sounded like something from a dream. Because in my head I have this loop of you saying, 'If I were a Gryffindor, I'd have killed you already'. And it's been in my nightmares ever since I woke up—you sad and disappointed and sort of threatening—and I thought I was making it up, or my damnable head was, but then Al read that letter and I thought it must have been a memory, not a nightmare." He was pressing so hard she thought she might have bruises there in the daylight. "Was it? Was it real, Lily?"

"Yeah, I said that." His touch relaxed. "I did, and I'm sorry."

"If you hadn't woken me up, I think I would have preferred that. Death, I mean. So don't apologise. But I am glad—mostly—that you were too Slytherin to kill me."

"In the end," Lily spoke more honestly than she had in ages, "I don't think I was. I just gave myself two choices: Either I healed you or I killed you. I didn't see there being much chance of anything else."

"Well, thank you for coming up with another option, anyway." He let go of her wrist. Her skin where he had been touching her was warm and then cold, an abruptly felt sense of loss.

"You're welcome. Are you all right—was your nightmare really bad?"

"It was bad enough. I haven't taken any sleeping potion since I made you leave." He sounded rueful. "My way of punishing myself, I guess."

"That's dumb, Ted."

"I know. I have to fall asleep naturally sometime, though. I figured I might as well start sooner than later. And if it's a way of atoning for things..."

Lily couldn't tell him off for that—after all, she had done the same, in some ways, when she gave up everything for him, but really for herself. "Teddy, about that letter..."

"Look, it's fine." He patted the place beside him on the mattress, Lily's usual place, and she sat in it, grateful. "It really is. I mean, I understand where you were coming from when you wrote that—and I'm still bloody pissed at myself for making you go through that—that whole thought process—especially at fucking eight years old, but I fully understand you. And I am sorry, you can't stop me from saying it, but I'm also sorry for the last week, because that wasn't fair to you, either. I didn't know what to do, so I just blocked you out."

"I'm glad you're letting me back in, now. It was getting to the point where I was about to start stalking your physical therapist for information."

He laughed. "You can ask me about it, now, if you want to."

"How's walking coming, then?"

"I've managed a few more steps with the walker." He looked excited, his teeth bright flashes in the darkness. "Which isn't really a big deal but Ryan says it's probably going to all click together soon and then I'll be practically back to normal."

"It is a big deal, though, Teddy. That's a very big deal." She clapped her hands together and then leaned forward, brushing away any remaining distance between them, and pressed a kiss to his forehead. "I'm so thrilled for you."

He snaked an arm around her back and pulled her into a hug—awkward because of the angle, but not uncomfortable. She settled against his shoulder and stretched her legs out beside his, but above his sheets.

"But now I need to know what I'm going to do once my legs start working, once I can function on my own again. I'll need to move out, of course," Lily tried to stop her grip on his waist from tightening at that, "And I'll need to get a job. I can't see myself bartending anymore. And I don't want to move back to Grimmauld Place." He glanced down at Lily's face, his lips an inch from her forehead. "Your dad won't be upset about that, will he?"

"I don't think so. The house is a big responsibility, and you don't have the best memories there. He'll understand."

"I hope so," Teddy sighed. "Hey, I'm sorry. It's really late. I didn't mean to wake you—did I wake you? Was I that loud?—and now I'm keeping you up, fuck, I suck."

Lily laughed. "You didn't wake me, I was downstairs and I heard you, and it's fine. I'd rather not be alone right now, anyway."

"What's the matter?"

"Nothing, or everything, but really nothing." Lily shook her head against his shoulder. "Sorry, it's just nothing you'd be interested in, or nothing you should worry about, or nothing all that important, anyway."

"That's a lot of nothings." He reached for her wrist again. It was strange, how comforting that gesture was. "And you're really only succeeding in making me more curious, you understand."

"It's just a boy thing," she explained, "You really don't want to know."

"Oh." Teddy went quiet and tense all against her. "You have a boyfriend?"

"That is the question of the evening. I don't think so. Maybe."

"D'you," Teddy sounded uncomfortable, "Do you like him?"

"Not as much as he likes me," Lily said, with certainty. "But I take a long time to warm up to people."

"You didn't take that long to warm up to me," Teddy pointed out.

"Are you kidding? It took me ten years of you not talking for me to like you well enough to deal with you for the month and a half you have been talking."

Teddy let out a dissatisfied sound, along the lines of a discordant hum. "You really know how to win people over, don't you?"

"Oh, Teddy, I was just kidding. You are my...I don't know? My constant. You must know that." She hesitated to say favourite, thinking the declarative term might scare him.

"Not really, considering I haven't exactly been here for you for the past ten years—"

Lily cut him off. "Don't be ridiculous. Haven't I told you? You were there for me—involuntarily, for the most part—but you were."

"Not involuntary anymore," he said, and it sounded like a promise.

"Well, good." Lily pressed her face into his shoulder and he tightened his arm around her waist. They fell asleep like that, waking up with Lily still on top of Teddy's sheets and Teddy still beneath them when the sun rose and a bird tapped against the window.

Lily rolled sleepily from Teddy's bed and opened the window, wiping matter from her eyes as she detached the note from Quentin. Of course it was Quentin.

Connor had written: _Come out on a real date with me tomorrow? I promise I won't keep you out too late._

Lily sighed and patted Quentin on the head. Teddy blinked, bleary, up at her. "Problem?"

"Do I take a chance?" she asked him.

"I don't know. What are the stakes?"

"One: I lose a friend. Two: I lose a friend and gain a boyfriend. Three: I lose a friend and a boyfriend, at some date in the probably near future."

"Ah," Teddy said. "That, I'm afraid, is entirely out of my depth."

Lily wanted, really wanted, to go back to the night before and end the evening after the first pub, before the kiss. That seemed to indicate that "No," was the proper response—but then she'd lose Connor. He had put up with a lot of shit from her, and if she told him no, she knew, that would be the end of it.

"I don't want to lose Connor. He's been there for me—you can't tell anyone, but he helped me with you—and he's never asked for anything, not really."

"But you don't want to date him." Teddy sounded exhausted.

"No, I guess not."

"Well, then. Tell him that."

"Let's be 'just friends'? Connor wouldn't go for that."

"Then," Teddy yawned, "may I say that he's not really worth your time?"

Quentin hooted and cuffed Teddy on the head with a wing. "Quentin," Lily snapped. "But, Ted, he's a good guy."

"I'm sure," Teddy sighed. "Lily, I told you, I can't help you here. But I would say, don't do anything that you really don't want to do." He looked as if he wanted to say something else, but he bit his lip and refused to continue, even when Lily prodded him.

"Fine," she said. She leaned over Teddy's desk, wrote a response to Connor, and gave it to Quentin, who swooped low over Teddy before flying out the window.

"Done?" Teddy asked.

"Finished," Lily replied. "Do you want toast for breakfast?" She went to get it without waiting for an answer.


	10. Chapter Nine

**Disclaimer:** I do not own _Harry Potter_.

**A/N:** I'm very sorry this took so long, I'm also terribly sorry that it sucks. As a head's up, I think the next will be the last chapter (although it's possible there will be two more)! Thank you so much for reading this, and for your continued patience!

Chapter Nine

Lily sat alone in the café. Connor had agreed to meet her there at half past one, and it was ten past two. She had a book out on the table but wasn't reading it; instead she was, for the fifth time, mentally rehearsing what she wanted to say to Connor.

He had pointed it out before, and she had agreed—their friendship was largely based on convenience. When Connor had helped organize her sixth year Muggle Studies class's visit to King's College he had gotten caught in her web of celebrity. He had known her brothers at Hogwarts and had known _of _Teddy and Victoire, but he had never gotten to truly know a Potter or a Weasley until he and Lily began talking. And when Lily's world imploded, Connor was convenient. He was a bit mad, dazzling in a near-false way, and Lily had grabbed a hold of him at her first opportunity. She hadn't let go since, and she didn't want to.

But she didn't love him, couldn't think of him as someone to kiss regularly, and the thought of taking him to bed made her feel uncomfortable. She was an able liar, despite what Albus always said, but she wasn't about to dig her way into a lie that deep, just to preserve a friendship that would be wrecked beyond saving when the relationship ended. And it would end; Lily wasn't willing to lock herself into something that didn't thrill her. And she might not have known how "thrilling" felt, but she did know that on the night she and Connor had kissed she had dreamt of beer-flavoured suffocation.

Connor appeared as she was reaching her sixth rendition of the conversation they needed to have, his lips twisting as the bell chimed with the swing of the open door.

He half-waved at her, his hand at his stomach, and stopped at the counter to get a coffee before sitting down across from her.

"So, seeing as how you rescheduled this from tonight, I'm assuming we won't be calling it a date?"

Lily nodded, all the words she had repeated in her head lost in the force of his sardonic tone. "Yeah, no, we won't."

"Great, Lily. Brill. Could you possibly explain your reasoning to me? We get along all right, don't we?"

Lily placed her sweaty palms on the table and inhaled. "It's not about getting along. I get along with Ris and Bea and Hugo, and I don't want to date any of them."

"Clear reasons for that, though, aren't there?"

"Not exactly the point." Lily scrambled to remember how she has planned on letting Connor down gently. Clichés were rolling back to her, beginning with the terrible, awful "we can still be friends." She bit her lip.

"What is the point, then? You just don't like me like that? Great, Lil. Wonderful. Thanks for, you know, making that clear when you kissed me."

"Connor," Lily began, and then stopped when he looked at her, eyes bright.

"I know I keep asking you to let me talk, but—this is the last time, I swear. I just need you to see something. And this may be mean, but I'm in the mood to be mean, because I spent yesterday and last night stupidly delirious over you and then I get a note from you and all that comes crashing down. So I want to be mean, just once." Lily inhaled a shaky breath. Connor continued, "You do this thing where you draw people in. I'm not sure if it's intentional—I'm pretty sure it's not. But you do, Lil, you draw people in until they couldn't escape you if they wanted to, you become so important, so central, and it's weird because where everyone else needs you you behave like you don't need anyone. I mean, all right. You needed me for small things—like getting into King's and getting Teddy's blood—but _you_, you yourself, you don't need anyone. I don't know if it's conscious or not, but I'm starting to see it. I love you because I can't not love you, but you won't love anyone, because you are afraid, maybe, or because you are angry, or because you just don't—I don't know. I think that's what I'm saying, is that I don't know you, and I feel like an idiot because I thought that—out of everyone—I had the best chance at it. Knowing you, I mean. Loving you."

"Why?" Lily couldn't keep the question from falling between them, and Connor blinked at her.

"Fuck, I don't know. How could I be so stupid, right?"

"No, Connor, that's not what I meant. I just—I don't love anyone, you're right, I don't know how to, I'm dysfunctional, and you do know me, so why would you think that I'd get over all that, ever?"

"Because you've been softer lately." He shook his head. "And I was there when no one else was."

Lily pressed her palms harder against the table and waited. Her words of comfort, her synonymous phrases to "we can still be friends" seemed irrelevant now. Connor had always been all or nothing, had always loved and hated quickly.

"But now," Connor sighed, "I'm starting to think that maybe I'm not the one who's breaking down your walls." He pushed back from the table, picked up his cardboard coffee cup, and paused as he passed Lily's seat. "Give me a few months, Lily. I promise I won't forget about everything, just because you can't love me."

She nodded as he left her, and after the bell had signalled his departure she stood and walked to the back of the shop, where a curtained area was reserved for Disapparation.

Lily didn't go home. Instead, she Apparated to the landing outside of Ris and Hugo's flat. She knocked at the door and waited a few minutes before unlocking it and stepping inside. Ris was lying on the sofa, a mug of coffee on the table beside her, her bare foot keeping the beat to some song only she could hear.

"Lily! Hi! Sorry, I didn't feel like getting up."

"It's fine." Lily sat down on the arm at the end of the couch. "Is Hugo around?"

Ris shook her head. "Nah, he's at work. I have taken a 'personal day,' by which I mean my boss was pissing me off and I didn't want to see her at all today. What're you doing out? Doesn't Sir Lupin require your attention?"

Lily shook her head. "I just got coffee with Connor. Or sort of. Mostly I think I just broke Connor's heart, and then he said some stuff and...did I tell you Teddy is almost able to walk normally now? Or he's getting there, and as soon as he gets there he's going to move out."

"Okay, hold up." Ris pushed herself up so she was sitting cross-legged, facing Lily. "Shouldn't you be happy about Teddy being all better? Wasn't that the point of healing him in the first place?"

The point of healing him was redemption, but Lily couldn't say that. "It sounds selfish...it _is _selfish, but what am I meant to do, Ris? Healing Teddy is all I've thought about for the last year. And now there's no Hogwarts—not that I want there to be, anymore—but where do I go?"

"Well," Ris picked at her nails, "that's obvious. You go to Muggle school. College, then med school, then you come back and heal all the witches and wizards that St. Mungo's staff have declared incurable."

Lily opened her mouth to protest, but Ris held up a hand and continued, "I know you don't like to be told what to do. I know that the minute anyone tells you what to do you run in the other direction. But that is my suggestion, and I think you should consider it. Just think about it. After all, you liked helping Teddy, right?"

"But that was Teddy," Lily pointed out.

"And every person lying near-dead has a family that cares about them. Just think about it." Ris drew her knees to her chin. "Now, more importantly, _what_ just went down with Connor?"

Lily recounted the whole last year of her friendship with Connor, leaving out the parts about him helping her with Teddy, and Ris stayed uncharacteristically silent through the whole story. When Lily finished, Ris shook her head, still picking at her nails, and then said, "And you're sure you don't like him at all? Because he sounds like he gets you." Lily stiffened and Ris hurried, "Just that he's perceptive, is all I mean."

"Not like that," Lily told her. "And not because I'm scared or anything. I just don't."

"Okay." Ris rolled her lower lip between her teeth. "All right. Have you thought—have you thought about what he meant when he said he wasn't the one breaking down your walls or whatever?"

"It's a bunch of psychoanalytical crap. He's always trying to figure people out, Ris. I don't think it means anything."

Ris raised her eyebrows.

"You think it means something?" Lily asked. "What?"

"I'm not going to force you to see it if you don't want to. That won't help anyone."

Lily shook her head. "See what?"

"Nothing, Lil. Look, have you eaten? Want to go get Indian, or something?"

"No, I should probably get home. Thanks." She hopped down from the couch and fished her wand from her purse.

Ris shrugged. "Sure. Tell Teddy I said hi." Lily just barely heard her as she Disapparated, and she appeared in her living room scowling.

"Whoa, there, everything okay?" Ryan the physical therapist was standing by the fireplace, his hand in the Potters' Floo container. "You look like someone ate your brother."

Lily laughed. "Where does that expression come from? I hope no one would want to eat either of my brothers."

"Irrelevant. Is everything all right?" Ryan asked, stepping away from the fire.

"Yeah, everything's fine." Lily smiled at him. "Peachy, etc. How's Teddy?"

Ryan's expression relaxed. "He's got some good news for you, actually." He shook his head as he stepped back towards the fireplace. "It's amazing how he's coming along. You're a miracle worker, Lil."

"Teddy is," Lily corrected.

Ryan tossed his Floo powder into the fireplace and said, "I don't think so. Or, he's not miraculous on his own, anyway." He stepped into the green flames and Lily sighed. People kept leaving her with statements that hinted of too much and said too little.

"Teddy," she called, moving down the hall, "Ryan says you have good news?"

He was grinning when she got to the doorway of his bedroom. "Guess!" He was sitting up, one leg dangling over the edge of the mattress, and he looked as close to healthy as Lily had seen him in ten years.

"Lisa Bell, of the Holyhead Harpies, stopped by to confess her undying love for you."

"Yeah, no. You're ruining it."

Lily held up her hands. "Sorry, sorry. Did you walk?"

And there was that grin, his eyes bright and light and his hair a crazy kaleidoscope of colours before calming. "Only once across the room, but all on my own, Lil. No walker or Ryan or anything. And I didn't feel weak at all."

"That's brill, Ted. It really, really is." Lily wanted to throw herself across the room and hug him, but something about the tone of Ris's voice when she had said, "Tell Teddy I said hi," stopped her. Instead she ruffled Teddy's hair and squeezed his shoulder and smiled in a genuine but still stiff way.

He watched her as she played with the collection of bottles on the desk. "What's wrong? I would have thought you'd be more excited than I am—I'll be out of your hair soon. You can get on with your life."

"You're not an obligation and you're not holding me up, so stop talking like that," Lily spoke to the bottles, and then turned, trying to smile, "but I am excited, Teddy. It's awesome."

"Except that you look like someone shot your brother."

"What is it with everyone and hurting my brothers?" Lily snorted, came close to the bed and, ignoring the echo of Ris's voice in her head, leaned forward and pulled Teddy's broadening shoulders into a hug. She pressed a kiss to the top of his hair—now settled somewhere in the orangeish-yellow colour range—and said, "I am so, so happy for you, Teddy."

"Well, okay then." He blinked up at her as she pulled away. "Good."

"Good?"

He nodded. "Lil, can you do me a favour?"

"Anything, sir." She was at the bottles again, surprised that there was only enough there to last another week—did Ryan expect Teddy to be cured so soon?

"Can you ask Graham and Victoire to come over sometime soon? This weekend. Please?"

Lily turned. Teddy was staring at the blanket bunched around his knees, determinedly not looking at her. "You think—I mean, yeah, of course. I'll owl them now."

"Thank you," Teddy spoke softly, still not looking up.

As she was about to leave the room, he asked, "Oh, Lil, sorry—how'd your lunch with Connor go?"

"Fine." She glanced over her shoulder and half-smiled at him. "It went fine."

"But what did you tell him?"

Lily shrugged. "Nothing, really. He sort of—well, I asked him to get coffee, not dinner or drinks, you know? He knew what that meant."

"But, Lily," Teddy began, as she pushed the door the rest of the way open.

"It's really fine, Ted," she repeated. "Stop worrying. I'll go send that owl off to Graham and Vic, all right? Do you need anything?"

"No," he said, as she left. "No, I'm fine."

:::

Graham and Victoire spent Sunday night with Teddy. Lily spent Friday night with a stack of textbooks and a thick application with impossible-to-answer questions such as, "Describe yourself," and "What qualifies you to participate in the Magical Students at Muggle Universities (TM) Program? (In five sentences or less, please.)" She was cursing Ris and the way her stupid ideas got stuck in Lily's head long before she reached the second page; she was ready to actually curse Victoire and Graham and Teddy for their stupidly loud laughs by the third.

"Lil?" Her father tapped against her doorframe about the time she reached the fifth page, having stuffed her wand beneath her pillow so she wouldn't accidentally-on-purpose set the papers on fire. "How's it going?"

"Miserably. Can't they just let me in without all of this?"

Harry chuckled. "I could throw my weight around, but I don't think you really want that."

Lily gave him a small smile; years ago she may have loved that. "No, I guess not. It's just that some of these questions are so dumb."

"Welcome to the world of paperwork." Harry stepped into Lily's room and perched on the edge of her bed as she turned in her desk chair to face him. He tilted his head, watching her, and she waited. "I just wanted to say, Lily, that your mum and I are really proud of you. For everything you've done for Teddy, and now for this, for planning college and medical school and all of this—we are very impressed."

Lily shrugged. "It's not like I really have any other interests."

Harry shook his head. "You do, though. I wanted to make sure...are you all right? With all the changes coming in the next few months...are you sure you're okay with everything?"

"I'm excited. It's not as if I'm moving out, or anything. It'll be much easier commuting from here than it was from Hogwarts."

Harry sighed. "Don't remind me. But Teddy is moving out. So that will be a big change."

Lily looked at her father for a long silent moment. "He is. But why would that matter?"

"Well, he's your friend, Lil. Why wouldn't it matter?"

"I mean, I'll still see him. And I'll have school and all the people I'll meet there and it'll just be different, Dad, but it won't be bad." She remembered saying that to Teddy, how different could be better, and she wondered if she was lying to herself.

"Of course you'll still see him." Harry smiled at her and stood. "Okay, I'll let you get back to it. Just wanted to make sure you're all right."

"I'm good. Thanks, Dad."

"Sure." Harry dropped a kiss on her head and Lily turned back to her papers as he disappeared down the stairs.

She stared at the lines awaiting her answers and shook her head. Everyone kept insinuating things about Teddy, or maybe she just thought everyone was insinuating things, but she felt as if there were layers to their words when they said things like, "Say hi to Teddy," or reminded her that Teddy was leaving, as if that wasn't already on her mind. She wasn't sure what she was feeling about him, but she knew that her parents and Ris and Connor were digging for something, and she had never been like ruins—she had never wanted people to uncover her insides.

Lily sighed and wrote, "I am very interested in the way the human body functions," beneath a question about her intended field of study, and then dropped her head to the desk and shut her eyes. Maybe the answers would reach the page through reverse osmosis.

Sometime later she heard the sound of the Floo going, but she waited fifteen minutes before pushing back from the desk and her nearly-finished application and starting down the stairs. The ground floor was empty, and she hesitated when she reached Teddy's bedroom. She leaned her forehead against the wall beside his open doorway and listened to the silence—from here she couldn't even hear him breathing, and it felt like a long time since she had imagined his steady but weak pulse every time she was near him.

"Lily?" His voice was quiet, as if he wasn't sure that she was there, and she stepped around the corner to see him squinting through the dim light of the overhead lamp at her. "Good, it is you. I thought I heard something."

"Just me." There were two chairs by his bed where hers usually sat, and she wondered if it was wrong to feel displaced.

"I walked them to the Floo," he said. "And I walked back."

"That's great, Ted." Lily leaned against the desk, arms crossed.

"It is, isn't it? Ryan thinks I'll be ready to move out in a few weeks—finally able to get on with my life." He was smiling, and Lily nodded in agreement.

"Yeah, that'll be really, really good." She bit her lip. "How were Graham and Vic?"

"Good. Great." His smile hadn't even faltered. "I think everything's going to be okay, Lily. I think I won't be pining after my first girlfriend forever."

"Of course you won't, you idiot."

"Well, I was concerned." Teddy sounded serious and Lily sighed as he continued, "So, when I move out, what do you think I should do? Become a Muggle model? I could do hair commercials—they wouldn't even need to dye my hair."

"They might start getting suspicious after a while, though. Probably too risky."

"Probably," he agreed. "So, what would you suggest, then? You're going back to school, could I join you?"

Lily laughed to stop herself from imagining Teddy sitting beside her in the massive lecture halls at King's. The picture came too easily. "No, I think you'd be bored by student-ing."

"Also known as studying," Teddy muttered, and his tone was a little more serious, steadier, as he asked, "Well, what do I do, then, Lil? I need to make money, and Graham and Vic keep saying they'll get me something in the Ministry but I—I never wanted to end up there."

She rubbed her nose, thought about Ris saying that she never listened to other people, thought about how that theory, the go-your-own-way theory, had always seemed a good one. "What were you thinking of doing before the coma?"

Teddy hissed through his teeth, an exasperated sound. "Work as a bartender and then go to the Ministry when I was old—but now I am old and I can't imagine going into the Ministry, I just—Lil, I don't want to."

"Then don't. It's fine if you don't."

"But then what do I do?" He was whining, now, sounding like Lily used to when she was little and her brothers wouldn't play with her.

"Do something—work in a coffee shop, go back to the bar, work in a club, get a job with Uncle Ron—do something, until you figure out what it is you _want _to do. And if that's not something that will make you money, or whatever, then that's fine. Keep making money doing the thing you fell into, and make yourself happy doing the thing you want to do. I don't think your job needs to be the end of the world, Teddy. It doesn't need to define you."

Teddy didn't say anything for a few minutes. And then he looked at her and shook his head. "But that's easy for you to say. You've got it figured out. You'll help people. But how can I—"

"It's not _easy _for me. I don't want to help people. Does that sound terrible? It's true. I am the most selfish person you will ever meet. I am doing this because I like it, not because of how I can help people, but because it keeps me sane. It's not about the rest of the world. It should be, probably, but it isn't. And you'll help people, if that's what you want to do, just by being you. I don't do that, you do."

"You helped me."

"We've gone over this, Ted. Maybe I did, but it wasn't selfless on my part."

"Okay, fine. But let's say that I take your advice. Let's say I just go out and get some random job—isn't that more waiting? Waiting to find something new?"

Lily shrugged. "I don't think so, but if you think it is, then it probably will be. Look, this is your life, Ted. You're going to have a lot of chances to change it."

"If you say it's never too late I'm never speaking to you again," he warned.

"Of course it's sometimes too late—maybe it's often too late. But for you I don't think this year is too late. Or next. Maybe in ten years, maybe then I'll tell you to get off your arse. But now, you've got a bit of time to sort things out. Take it."

"I sometimes think," he said, not looking at her again, looking out his window this time, "that you grew to be twenty-nine while I was lying here. That we switched places."

"You're an idiot, then. I'm still a kid."

"I think I always will be, even ten years from now." He shook his head, and then turned to look at her, eyes grey and searching. "But you, in ten years I think you'll have everything figured out."

Lily stepped away from the desk, towards the bed. "Teddy, you keep looking at me wrong."

"What—what do you mean?" He drew back, moved over on his bed, so he was pressed against the wall.

"Like I'm some mystery that needs to be understood, or something. Like I'm not a person, like I'm an enigma, like I'm not what you expected and therefore I am—what? Either too shallow or too deep, I think. And I'm nothing, Ted. Honestly, nothing, and you need to stop looking at me like you do, like I should be discovered, because it's making me insane."

He shut his eyes and scrubbed his hands through his hair. Lily hadn't intended to say all that. She had wanted to tell him to stop looking at her like she confused him, that was all. She hadn't wanted to open this mess. Not tonight, not ever. She was about to turn to go when he said, "But you talk like this, Lily. You talk like you know what's going on, better than the rest of us. Better than I do, at least. You talk like—like an adult, and I don't get it, and so I look at you because you _do _confuse me. But that's not a bad thing. I don't think it's a bad thing, anyway. I just want to know what you know. Is that wrong?"

"Why, though?" Lily backed away from the bed. "Why do you think I know anything at all?"

"You talk like you do," he said again, dropping his hands and looking at her. "And Lily, no one could ever see you and think of you as nothing. Please just get that. All I want from you—all most people want, I'm willing to bet—is to know you. Not even understand you. Just know you."

"Why, though?" she repeated, and then shook her head. "No, please don't. I won't get it, Teddy. See? I'm no more an adult than you are." And she half-smiled at him, but her heart was pounding too hard for her to cross the distance their conversation had created between them.

"And I'm meant to be the old one," he pointed out, attempting a smile that twisted oddly on his lips. "Look, I'm sorry, Lil. I didn't mean to offend you or confuse you or anything. I just—it bothers me when you say things like that, like saying you're nothing. Because you matter to me—to us, your family, your friends. And how you see yourself? I don't get it. But that doesn't mean that I have any right to argue with you about it, or whatever. So I'm sorry."

"It's fine, really. It's okay." Lily waved her hand as if that gesture would clear the strange awkwardness that hung around them. "Let's just not talk about it anymore?"

"Sure." His smile was wide, but the way it sat was forced, and Lily could feel the rift between them growing with each silent second.

"I should probably get to bed. I just—Teddy, don't worry about the future too much. I think you'll work it out."

He looked at her, eyebrows raised. "Thanks. I hope you're right."

"Just stay away from experimental potions," she added, as she left the room. She heard his pillow hit the doorframe and let out a laugh that drifted into a sigh as she returned to her bedroom. The thing she'd learned about distance was that bridges didn't eradicate it—they just made it a little bit easier to avoid.


	11. Chapter Ten

**Disclaimer:** I don't own _Harry Potter_.

Chapter Ten

Ryan declared Teddy was ready to move out two weeks before Lily started school. He decided to move on the Sunday before Lily's second week of classes. There was nothing holding him at the Potters; Ryan had said he was ready, Teddy had said he wanted to go, and Harry had told him to Floo if he ever needed anything. Teddy was walking almost normally, although on long days he used a cane, and his flat in Hogsmeade was on the second storey—a manageable walk on good days, an inconspicuous Apparation on bad ones.

Lily had allowed preparation for school and then the classes themselves to consume her; by the morning before Teddy's moving day she had almost convinced herself that she wouldn't miss him. And then he called up to her bedroom from the second-storey landing and she realized that after that night she would need to make special arrangements to see him, would need to Floo him and ask to meet for coffee, like he was just anyone else, and she felt a bit like a hole had opened up inside of her.

She hopped down the stairs from her bedroom and landed beside him. "What's up? Do you need help moving something?"

He shook his head, then nodded. "Well, sort of. Most of my stuff, it's still at Grimmauld Place?"

"Yeah. All your books and clothes and everything are. I thought you and Dad would have gotten over there this week, to pack it all up?"

He rubbed his forehead, which was beginning to show signs of his recent stress in horizontal lines. "He mentioned something about it but I kept putting it off. I'm a little nervous about going back there, to be honest."

"Oh. Yeah, I can see that."

"Would you mind—would you come with me? I understand if you're too busy or if you have plans but if you could—it would be nice."

Lily hadn't been back to Grimmauld Place since she had finished Teddy's cure, and she said, "Of course," without thinking about it. "When do you want to leave?"

"I'll just get some boxes, and we can go. If that's all right with you?"

She nodded and followed his slow steps down the stairs to the kitchen, where a stack of flattened cardboard boxes sat against the refrigerator. Lily grabbed a few before Teddy could, and nodded him back into the living room. He narrowed his eyes at her in annoyance but followed her directions and dropped Floo Powder into the fireplace before stepping in. Lily fell out into Grimmauld Place with ashy cardboard protecting her from landing on the brick of the hearth.

Teddy stood to the side, blinking around him with his hands in his pockets, his shoulders tense and caved in on themselves. "This is weird," he muttered, as Lily stood and dusted herself off, leaving the boxes on the bricks.

She took his hand and squeezed, then let go and said, "The kitchen's a mess because I haven't cleaned it since I was last here—so that shouldn't remind you of anything. Do you want to come down there with me? Or would you rather just start packing up your stuff?"

He glanced down at her, then looked around at the few photographs that still decorated the walls and the books that Graham had left where Teddy had scattered them on the tables and sofa. "I think I should start packing. You can clean up the kitchen, if you want."

"Sure, if you don't want company."

"Yeah. I'll let you know if I need you."

Lily nodded and left him standing in the living room. She collected long overdue books from the counters of the kitchen, poured Teddy's precious poisoned blood down the drain of the sink, Dispelled ruined potions and ingredients to the rubbish bin, and Spelled Connor's cauldron small enough that she could return it to him via owl. The cleanup process took her a few hours, and once she was finished she perched on the table, waiting for Teddy to call her. After twenty minutes of skimming through books that she had spent much of the previous year immersed in, she slid from the table and went to look for Teddy. Whatever he said, she had a feeling he would need her. Or someone, anyway, and she was the only one there.

The living room was packed, the couches that had been in Grimmauld Place forever were bare of Weasley knitted blankets, the walls empty, the books stacked or tossed into the boxes that now sat unfolded and full in the corner by the fireplace.

Lily continued down the hall and up the stairs, walking slowly towards Teddy's old room. The door was open and she hesitated in the hallway, listening for any sign of his mood. But it was silent—there wasn't even the sound of Teddy moving—and Lily had a sudden thought of Grimmauld Place being cursed, of Teddy falling into a coma by breathing its air, and she practically leapt the last few steps into his bedroom.

He sat cross-legged by the bookshelf, a familiar letter open in his lap. He didn't look up at Lily's abrupt arrival in the doorway, and she could see the wetness of tears on his face. She moved cautiously to kneel beside him, reached and pressed two fingers against the pulse-point on the soft inside of his wrist.

She looked down at the letter, which she had last seen the miraculous weekend of her breakthrough in Teddy's treatment, and kept her fingers on Teddy's fast heartbeat. She waited for him to speak.

"Do you know how lucky we are?" His voice wavered, wet with leftover tears.

Lily didn't say anything. She wasn't sure what he meant. The letter had described his dead parents—it didn't seem like a terribly lucky thing.

"To be loved, I mean, the way your family loves. We're really really lucky, Lily. I'm...imagine if they hadn't been here for me. Where would I be, now? Who would I be? Anyone else would have let me disappear. Especially after the potions. Anyone else would have let me fade. But you all—you don't give up, do you? I'm really very grateful for that." He slipped his wrist away from her fingers, only to replace it with his hand. He rubbed his thumb over the back of her hand and added, "You said something like that, when I first woke up and wasn't very happy about it. I didn't get what you meant then. I think I do now. But you have to know how lucky you are, too, Lily. I'm not the only one who's well-loved."

Teddy was saying thank you, but he was also apologising. She was unsure of whether his apology was for what had happened before or for what was happening right then. A part of her felt as if he was saying goodbye, another part felt as if he was asking her a question she didn't know how to answer.

Lily slid her hand from his and pushed herself up. "Yeah. I know. Do you want me to bring some boxes up for you?" She had been unsuccessfully pushing Teddy away since he and Victoire and Graham had started talking again, since their argument, discussion, whatever, that night. She didn't want to miss him. But she also hadn't wanted him to be the one to say goodbye. Lily always chose when things ended.

He looked up, eyes still bloodshot from the tears. "Do you know what this is?" He tapped the letter with a long finger.

"I know." She sighed. "I found it when I was looking for your stuff about the potions. I shouldn't have read it."

"But you did." Teddy folded the letter and slipped it back into the book. "Why did you?"

Lily wiped her hands on her jeans. "Because if my cure didn't work I didn't want to miss out on a chance to know you a little better. I also didn't want to lose the chance to know my father."

"But you do know your father. And you did before you read this letter."

"He was always different with you. I wanted to know that side of him. I was always the one who needed to be protected. For the time I could remember, you were more like a friend to him. He trusted you more than he did me. I wanted to know what that was like."

Teddy stood, one hand grasping the top of the bookshelf as he found his footing. He didn't look angry, but Lily and he had not been on the same wavelength recently. "Are you—you are, you're afraid?" Teddy stared at her, incredulous. "Of me?"

"I'm nervous," Lily corrected, "that you might be upset with me."

"I'm not." Teddy shook his head. "I swear I'm not. You told me you had gone through my stuff way back when I first woke up. I said it was fine then, and it's fine now, too. I wasn't awake. It's not as if the letter had anything in it that I wouldn't have told you about, if I had been awake and you had asked about my family."

"Oh." Lily stepped back. "Well. Okay."

"Okay?" Teddy reached out a hand, a signal for her to stop. "Why are you doing this?"

"Doing what?"

"Running." She looked down at her feet, the way she stood still facing him, and then back up at his narrowed eyes. "I don't mean literally," he sounded frustrated, "I mean you are leaving me, aren't you? You have been for a while."

"I'm not," Lily claimed, "you're the one who's leaving."

"Lily." Teddy dropped his hand and took a step forward. Lily resisted the urge to move back, to maintain the space between them. "I'm not going to be living in your house anymore, but we can still hang out and stuff. Can't we? I thought we were friends. Aren't we?"

"But it won't be the same," she bit, a whine hanging from the words. Realising how pathetic she sounded, she added, "And you'll be busy with the shop and I'll be busy with school, so it'll be hard."

"Are you saying you don't want to try staying friends just because it'll change and be 'hard?'"

Lily blushed at the disbelief in his voice. "No, I'm not."

"Well, what are you saying, then?"

"I don't want to talk about this, Teddy. Sure, we'll still be friends. Everything will be normal. Sorry I seemed like I was pushing you away, I promise I wasn't, can we finish packing, please?"

Teddy reached out and pushed some hair away from her cheek. "Okay. Will you go get those boxes? These books won't pack themselves." She was in the hall before his smile of concession was more than half-formed.

:::

Lily met Teddy for drinks in Hogsmeade on the Friday of her second week of classes, after Teddy had been living in his flat for five days. It felt odd to see him in the yellow light of the Three Broomsticks, and the sight of him standing in the doorway looking around for her made her miss him more than she had at all during the busyness of her week—a strange admission, she knew, as she was seconds away from talking to him again. But the appearance of him alone, without her, even just for the moment before she waved him over, felt wrong.

He dropped across from her and reached immediately for his water glass. His hand was steady as it brought the glass to his mouth, and Lily told him, "You look really good."

"Thanks." He feigned a model's pose to make her laugh; it nearly worked. "You look quiet."

"How does one _look_ quiet?"

"Like," and then he brought his hands in front of his face like he was praying, bit his lower lip and let his eyelids fall half-shut, "introspective or whatever. Is everything okay?" He broke the expression.

"Everything's good. Classes are fine. Interesting. It's weird, actually being a student there. I have to do the reading and write essays and use the library to do things other than research blood diseases."

"Well, that's good," Teddy pointed out, "as my blood no longer requires your expertise."

Lily nodded. "I guess. It's keeping me busy, anyway. How is it working with Uncle Ron?"

"Good. Really good. I'm having a lot more fun than I expected to. It's a bit mad at times, too. Like yesterday I was trying to stock these joke quills that are made to jump off your desk at random times or whatever, thereby ensuring total class disruption, and one of them jumped off the shelf and then they all were, and Ron and I had to run around the shop to corral them."

Lily laughed at the thought, picturing her Uncle Ron diving on top of jumping quills while Teddy shouted in the background. "Sounds fun."

"It is. And then I've been seeing a bit of Graham and Victoire so things feel—not like they were, but more normal, you know? And I've been feeling really well, health-wise. Ryan says he's never seen anyone recover so fast, and he thinks in a few weeks we'll be able to move our sessions to once a month."

"That's wonderful, Ted. You'll be happy to have fewer of those."

He shrugged. "It'll make all of this feel more lasting, that's for sure. I keep waking up in the morning expecting Ryan to come by and tell me I need to stay in bed, that my legs can't take another day. But that's just a sort of lingering nightmare—I get up and they're fine, and they stay fine."

"That'd be scary, to have Ryan appear in your room the second you wake up."

"Happened a few times, that time when we weren't talking. Believe me, it wasn't fun."

"Oh, I'd forgotten about that. I can't believe I abandoned you to him."

"Well, I sort of forced you to," Teddy pointed out, drawing a smiley face in the condensation on the side of his water glass. "Also, Ryan's not so bad. He's just not you."

"Glad to know I beat out your middle-aged physical therapist."

"By miles," Teddy said, and then, softer, again, "by miles."

His gaze caught hers and she looked away after a single breath, smiling but feeling uncomfortable, as if he had just made a confession. She wasn't sure what he was confessing, though, and she was very unsure of how to make confessions herself, so she changed the subject, saying, "I saw Connor in the library yesterday."

Teddy had been leaning slightly into the table, lessening the amount of space between them, but at her mention of Connor he straightened, pulling away as much as he could without moving his chair. "Oh?"

"He waved at me, but didn't come over, or anything. He said to give him a few months but being at school is—we were close friends, and now we're nothing, and I still see him. It's strange, you know?"

"Well," Teddy drew the word out, and Lily could hear a lot of discontent lingering in his tone, in the stretch of the syllable, "you did break his heart."

"I don't think it was that breakable," Lily said. "He's Connor, he always bounces back."

"And you're Lily, and you are insane and oblivious." Teddy leaned across the table again. "I'm sorry, I don't mean to be rude, I honestly don't, but if Connor felt for you half of what he said he did then it will take him a while to get over you. And if you push that, you will make it worse. You can't know, Lily, what other people are feeling."

"I know that." She stared at their half-empty pint glasses rather than at his eyes. "Obviously, I know that. It's just, it's only me, you know? It's not like Ris and Hugo or you and—sorry, you and Victoire."

"Why not? Why's it different for Connor?"

"Because I wasn't there, and I think he mostly knew I wasn't there."

"If you weren't there, Lily," Teddy hesitated and Lily glanced up at him for a brief uncomfortable moment before returning her gaze to the pint glasses, "if you weren't there, then where were you?"

The words sounded like a challenge, and Lily shrugged in response, allowing the tension between them to stretch until it broke. "I don't know," she said, "sorry, I didn't mean to turn this into a counselling session for me. Is anything else new with you?"

He didn't speak until she looked up at him, and then he kept his gaze steady, eyes hard. "Not really. I am going on a date tomorrow." Lily felt the world slip out of her grasp. "Well, a sort of date. Graham and Vic are introducing me to their friend Gwen, who apparently is 'perfect for me.'" The words and air-quotes were sarcastic, and Lily felt hopeful for a moment, and then he added, "I don't know, it should be fun. I haven't been on a date since Victoire, so we'll see."

"That'll be strange though, won't it?" Lily rushed to fill the silence, her mind juggling this information into place, "to go on your first date since Victoire with Graham and Victoire there?"

"It'll be awkward, but hopefully it'll be so awkward that it'll get it all done with at once. And even if Gwen doesn't work out, then it'll make the next first date easier."

"Why wouldn't Gwen work out?"

"I don't know, Lily. Sometimes people don't." Teddy rubbed a hand over his face and glanced at their glasses. "Do you want another beer?"

"But if Graham and Vic say she's perfect, then why wouldn't you be happy with her?" Lily could feel self-destruction in the question, could almost taste its acidic quality, but she couldn't stop herself. She wanted him to turn back to that question he had asked her before, to saying she beat Ryan by miles, to telling her things that she wasn't entirely comfortable with—at least then he had been in the territory of the two of them. Adding another person to their conversation felt like sabotage, and Lily was wilfully pushing it forward.

"Because I don't know her and I don't know if Graham and Vic still know me. Look, can I get you something else to drink?"

He was already standing, his hands splayed palms down on the table, but Lily shook her head. "Sorry, no, I'm good, thanks."

"Oh." He looked at the bar, crowded with Hogwarts students and recent graduates; Lily recognised most of them. A few of them glanced over at her and Teddy, and then away. She had never felt the effects of her last two years at Hogwarts more.

"You can get another, though. Don't let me stop you!" she told Teddy, but he shook his head.

"No, I should probably get going, anyway. Unlike you, I have places to be tomorrow morning."

"Oh?" Lily pushed away from the table and followed him through the crowd to the door.

"Work, Lil. Remember, the shop's open on Saturdays?"

"Right, of course."

They paused outside of the Three Broomsticks, in the damp rain of the September evening, and Lily reached for her wand. "So, have fun tomorrow. I hope the date goes well!"

"Wait, Lil." Teddy reached out and pulled her into a hug. She shrank away as soon as he released her. "I miss you," he said. "And am I crazy to think—I don't know, never mind. I'll see you next week, okay?"

"Yeah." She smiled at him as she Disapparated, but as soon as she arrived in her bedroom the smile crumpled. She sat at her desk and pulled the notebook in which she'd kept all of her notes on Teddy's coma, and she received a morbid sense of satisfaction from the reminder of the fact that she had been the only one to read Teddy's illness correctly. She had been the only one to save Teddy, and maybe some other girl would love him, but she had rescued him, and that had to mean something. She was starting to think that to her, at least, it meant everything.

:::

Lily spent Saturday trying to write an essay and Saturday night picking at the skin around her fingernails. She woke up Sunday morning with raw fingers and a sick feeling in her stomach. "Would it be desperate to show up at Teddy's?" she asked her reflection as she brushed her hair, and then, realising that Teddy may have brought his date home the night before, she banged her forehead against the glass and dropped her brush in the sink.

She pulled her hair onto the top of her head, secured it with an elastic, and grabbed a sweatshirt and her wand. Appearing on the landing outside of Victoire and Graham's flat moments later, she experienced an instant of indecision—this still looked desperate, she told herself, maybe even more desperate—but then the door to their flat opened and Graham blinked at her.

"Er, good morning, Lil. Is something wrong?"

"No, no, everything's fine! I just stopped by to see if Vic wanted to get coffee. Do you think Vic wants to get coffee?"

"You can ask her," he stepped aside and waved Lily into the flat, "but I bet she would."

"Where are you off to?" Lily hesitated in the doorway.

"To do damage control," he said, then added, "I'm getting breakfast with a friend. I bet Vic will tell you about it."

Graham turned and hurried down the stairs while Lily continued into the flat; she found Victoire reading the _Prophet _in the kitchen and dragged out to the coffee shop down the road.

"So, what did you want to talk about?" Vic asked, as they sat at a round table by the door.

"Nothing, I just hadn't seen you in a while."

"Okay," Vic stared at her over their coffees. "So what's new with you?"

"Nothing," Lily said, "Did you do anything fun last night?"

Vic smiled a bit too quickly. "Well, it should have been fun. Graham and I had a double date with Teddy and our friend Gwen."

"Oh?" Lily stared into her coffee cup, feeling hope uncurl from Vic's sardonic "should have."

"Yup. But then Teddy was really quiet all night—it was really uncomfortable, actually. Felt like he didn't want to be there. Graham and I felt so bad for Gwen—she was really hopeful. We thought they'd get along really well."

"Oh," Lily said, softer. She bit her lip.

"That's where Graham was running off to, when he let you in. He's trying to make it up to Gwen by buying her breakfast and letting her rant about Teddy. I was going to go—but we weren't sure. It may have been because of me, you know?"

Lily nodded, still not looking up from her coffee.

"But then," Vic reached out and tapped her finger against the rim of Lily's mug, "you don't _like_ him, do you, Lil? Teddy, I mean."

"Of course not," she said, fast. "He's old and...stuff."

"I should be offended by that, but I'll save it for later, because he's actually not old, and you know it." Victoire sounded as if she was smiling, and Lily looked up and saw that she was, a wide smile that she hadn't seen on her cousin's face in what felt like years. "Merlin, you do like him, don't you? You _really _like him."

"Be quiet, Vic." Lily shook her head. "I don't. I can't."

"Why don't you? Why can't you?"

"It's just—the history there. Doesn't that make it too weird? Doesn't that make me loving him too much?"

"Lily." Victoire stopped, rubbed her forehead. "If you love him, and I've never known you to lie about something like that, so if you love him, then that's not too much. It's not too weird. The history doesn't matter, you guys are both here, right now, and that's all you need to think about."

Lily looked around in a sudden panic, and Victoire laughed, a single relieved breath of air. "He's not _here_, Lil, I just meant that he's here, you know, in the general sense, and awake, and I think that it's stupid to keep this from him just because you're afraid of the past. It can't catch you, you know, it can't mess you up. It's finished."

"But what if," Lily looked back at her now-cold coffee, "what if he doesn't love me back?"

"Bad things, I suppose. You probably won't speak to him for a while." Lily felt the fear she'd felt when Teddy had first started talking about leaving, that aching fear of losing him. "But what if he does love you back, and you never know it? Or you only know it later, when it's harder? And Lily, judging from his attitude last night, I think there's a good chance he feels something for you. Because why would he have agreed to date my friend, if he still loved me?"

"Do you miss him?" Lily asked, after a long pause during which her voice struggled to make itself heard.

"I missed him when he was asleep. I have him now, and it's different than how I thought it would be ten years ago, but it's good. It's really very good, Lil. And I think it'll be even better, if you go talk to him."

Lily glanced up at her cousin. "Okay."

"All right?" Vic smiled. "Good."

:::

Lily knocked on the door to Teddy's flat after leaving Vic at hers and Dsapparating to Hogsmeade. She was on the landing outside his home before remembering that she looked a mess, and she gave her hair a perfunctory smoothing with one hand while the other rapped against his door.

He didn't answer. Lily knocked again, and still there was no response. She hesitated, then tapped her wand against his lock and opened it a crack, calling, "Teddy?" as she stepped inside. But he wasn't home.

She walked down the main street of Hogsmeade, and paused outside of her uncle Ron's shop. But he wasn't there, either, although Hugo was. Lily waved at him through the window and continued up the road. She wondered if his mood after the failed date was maudlin enough to send him to the Shrieking Shack.

He was there, standing outside the gate, his back straight and his hands pressed into the damp wood of the fence.

"Teddy," she called, as she neared him.

He glanced over his shoulder at her, offered a half smile. "When I was younger," he said, "I used to think a lot about being cursed. I thought maybe I was, because of my father, you know, and my mother, and how they died."

Lily stood beside him, and reached to press her fingers against her pulse-point. He didn't pull away. "It was dumb to think that I could have been cursed because of what happened to other people. I was only really cursed—if that's even the word for it—because of what happened to me, you know? What I did to me, I mean. And I thought, after I woke up, that I could have a new go at it. It's strange, because no matter what, I'm still me, and I still have this strange tendency to fuck things up."

"Are you talking about the date? Because that's just one thing, Ted, and it's in everyone's nature to make mistakes."

"But mine are astronomical. And this isn't just about the date. Although I imagine Vic and Graham are pissed at me?"

"Not really." Lily leaned her forehead against his shoulder and he tensed, but she didn't move. "They get it. What I don't get is why you think you make more mistakes than anyone else."

"Because I keep—I can't talk about this, Lil. What are you doing here?"

"I was looking for you, obviously."

"Why?" he asked, pulling away and turning to face her. She dropped her hand to her pocket and forced herself to look up at him.

"Because I really wanted to talk to you. Lately I've been—you said I was running away and I guess I have been."

Teddy looked as if he might have stopped breathing. Lily reached out and tapped a finger against his chest, irrationally hoping to feel his heartbeat in that gesture. He took a breath.

"And I guess I owe you an explanation, because we're us and aside from when we argue about really stupid things, we get along all right. And also because you're you and without you I wouldn't be me and the point is that I am terrified."

"Of me?" Teddy asked, voice almost lost in the damp wind.

"No, not of you, you idiot. Of what might happen if I tell you that I love you."

Teddy caught her hands as they flew to cover her mouth. She hadn't meant to say it like that, all at once. All hypothetical. His hands were cold.

"Chances are I'll want to kiss you," he said. "And I'll also want to know when and why and if you mean it. Mostly if you mean it."

"Of course I mean it."

"Of course you do."

And Lily kissed him, standing on tiptoe to press her lips to his in a quick, dry kiss that deepened and tasted of coffee and mint toothpaste. They sighed when they parted.

"So what makes you cursed?" Lily asked him, a little while later, as they stood side-by-side facing the Shrieking Shack, Teddy's arm around her waist and his hand tucked in her pocket.

"Not cursed. I was saying, I make mistakes that affect other people as much as they affect me. The one I was referring to earlier was my inability to talk to you normally."

"Because?"

"Because I love you, and you were driving me mad with the fact that you didn't seem to love me back."

"Of course I do."

"Of course," he repeated. "But this morning I was upset because I didn't think you did and I worried I'd never be able to be open with you again—and you're the one who saved me, the one who kept me sane. And so the thought of being separated from you, a little and always, was maddening. That would have been the worst curse in the world, to never be able to love you." He dug his chin into her hair, drew her closer.

"Well, I am very glad you're not cursed."

"Me too, Lil. Me too."

The End

**A/N: **Thank you all so much for reading this, and a special thanks to those who left reviews along the way. You are all lovely.


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